Whether and how a paternal health shock cascades across multiple generations to affect descendant health is understudied even though a link between ancestral living conditions and descendant health may constitute an important source of differences in the stock of health capital across families...

Much of the increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been in developing countries with a history of famines and malnutrition. Prior research has pointed to the association between overweight and famine exposure during developmental ages as one of several explanations and has...

This paper introduces four new intergenerational and multigenerational datasets which follow both sons and daughters and which can be used to study the persistence of longevity, socioeconomic status, family structure, and geographic mobility across generations. The data follow the children of...

During the twentieth century the 17 year survival rate of 50-64 year old men rose by 24 percentage points. I examine waiting time until death from all natural causes and from all chronic, all acute, respiratory, stomach, infectious, all heart, ischemic, and myocarditis disease among Union Army...

I use micro data on food and recreation expenditures from 1888 to 1994 to provide the first estimates of overall CPI bias prior to the 1970s and new estimates of bias since the 1970s and to reassess long-run growth rates. I find that CPI bias was -0.1 percentage points per year between 1888 and...

In the twenty-first century many of the professional and high ranking managerial workers in the United States and in other OECD countries will be women. This change in women's social and economic status represents a dramatic break with the past, but one that can only be understood by looking to...

Functional disability (difficulty in walking , difficulty in bending, paralysis, blindness in at least one eye, and deafness in at least one ear) in the United States has fallen at an average annual rate of 0.6 percent among men age 50 to 74 from the early twentieth century to the early 1990s....

I demonstrate that although socioeconomic differences in birth weight have always been" fairly small in the United States, they have narrowed since the beginning of this century. I argue" that maternal height, and therefore the mother's nutritional status during her growing years accounted for...

I show that the trend towards single households among older nonmarried women, the majority of whom were widows, has been ongoing only since 1940 and investigate the factors that fostered the rise in separate living quarters since mid-century by examining the impact of Old Age Assistance on...

I use consumer expenditure surveys from 1888-1890, 1917-1919, 1935-1936, 1972-1973, and 1991 to determine whether trends in real income per capita are consistent with trends in recreational budget shares and to establish trends in inequality in recreational expenditures. I find that changes in...