Exploiting cross-state variation in infectious causes of death, along with time variation arising from medical innovations toward the middle of the twentieth century, this study examines the consequences of a positive health shock in the US. It establishes that states with higher levels of...

Exploiting preintervention variation in mortality from various infectious diseases, together with the time variation arising from medical breakthroughs in the late 1940s and the 1950s, this study examines how a large positive shock to life expectancy influenced the formation of human capital...

Schooling. This study estimates the respective contributions of schooling and income in determining the fertility transition within the US states between 1840 and 1980. While evidence suggests that both relationships are negative and statistically signi?cant, the most robust determinant of the...

Exploiting pre-intervention variation in flu/pneumonia, tuberculosis and maternal mortality, together with time variation arising from medical breakthroughs starting in the late 1930s, this paper studies the aggregate impact of large health shocks across US states. The analysis demonstrates that...

This paper proposes the hypothesis that genetic distance to the health frontier influences population health outcomes. Evidence from a world sample suggests that genetic distance, interpreted as long-term cultural and biological divergence, is an important factor in understanding health...

We provide an estimate of China's impact on the growth rate of resource-rich countries after its WTO accession on 11 December 2001. Our empirical approach follows the logic of the differences-in-differences estimator. In addition to temporal variation arising from the WTO accession, which we...

We examine how the introduction of smallpox vaccination affected early-life mortality and fertility in Sweden during the first half of the 19th century. We demonstrate that parishes in counties with higher levels of smallpox mortality prior to the introduction of vaccination experienced a...

Based on a world sample of countries, this paper presents panel data evidence that documents a U-shaped relation between GDP per capita (wealth) and life expectancy (health). The evidence also shows that excluding the possibility of a nonmonotonic relationship induces erroneous conclusions about...

The long run welfare implications of the legal retirement age are studied in a perfect foresight overlapping-generations model where agents live for two periods. Agents’ lifetime is divided between working life and retirement by a legal retirement age controlled by the government whereas...

This paper proposes the hypothesis that genetic distance to the health frontier influences population health outcomes. Evidence from a world sample suggests that genetic distance - interpreted as long-term cultural and biological divergence - is an important factor in understanding health...