The millions of deaths that occurred during China's great famine of 1959-1961 were the result of one of the world's greatest civil demographic disasters. Two primary hypotheses have been advanced to explain the famine. One is that China experienced three consecutive years of bad weather while...

Celebrity media exposure is an increasingly strong source of actor popularity and is a viable star power variable that focuses on the impact of celebrity, not acting talent. Using <italic>People</italic> to calculate an actor's popularity, we analyse how the gender and age of a movie's lead actors affect box...

We model the relationship between local agricultural surpluses, nutritional status, and height, and we test the hypothesis that adult height is positively correlated with the local production of nutrition in infancy. We test the hypothesis on two samples of Union Army recruits - one consisting...

The Antebellum Puzzle' describes the situation of declining stature and rising mortality in the three decades prior to the American Civil War (1861-65). It is labeled a puzzle, since this period was one of rapid economic growth and development in the United States. Much of the debate regarding...

Antebellum critics of slavery argued that it was responsible for the relative inefficiency of free southern farms. We examine this issue, employing a stochastic production function, which allows us to distinguish between technological superiority and technical inefficiency, and controlling for...

The linearity of the U.S. hog—corn cycle has been questioned by <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="R4">Chavas and Holt (1991)</xref>. Even so, attempts have not been made to model the potential nonlinear dynamics in the hog—corn cycle by using regime-switching models. One popular alternative is <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="R43">Teräsvirta's</xref> smooth transition...