In this paper we test the ‘red herring’ hypothesis for expenditures on long-term care (LTC). The main contribution of this paper is to assess the ‘red herring’ hypothesis by using the probability of dying as a measure for time-to-death (TTD). In addition, we implement models that allow...

Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern...