We study the effect of royalty status - historically rooted legal privilege enjoyed by hereditary monarchs - on human longevity, a proxy of individuals' health capital. We disentangle royalty status that encompassed serving as heads of state, and hence subject to status-related stress, from...

We study the effect of royalty status - historically rooted legal privilege enjoyed by hereditary monarchs - on human longevity, a proxy of individuals' health capital. We disentangle royalty status that encompassed serving as heads of state, and hence subject to status-related stress, from...

We create a novel reign-level dataset for European monarchs, covering all major European states between the 10th and 18th centuries. We first document a strong positive relationship between rulers’ cognitive ability and state-level outcomes. To address endogeneity issues, we exploit the facts...