This paper examines the effectiveness of the public health education and poverty relief programs prior to the New Deal. Prior researchers have speculated these programs contributed to the declining mortality rates during the 1920s, but have been unable to econometrically estimate their impact...

This paper investigates the economic conditions of stepfamilies in Germany, the Russian Federation and France using data from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS). The analysis shows that stepfamilies more often report economic hardship than nuclear families in France and...

We study the effect of early life conditions, proxied by rainfall shocks, on schooling and height in rural Vietnam. Our measure of rainfall shock is defined as deviations from the long-run average. Many Vietnamese rural dwellers engage in rain-fed crop production, mostly irrigated paddy rice....

Background: After the reunification of Germany, mortality among older eastern Germans converged quickly with western German levels. Simultaneously, the pension benefits of eastern Germans rose tenfold. Objective: We make use of German reunification as a natural experiment to show that, first,...

While regional mortality inequalities in Germany tend to be relatively stable in the short run, over the course of the past century marked changes have occurred in the country’s regional mortality patterns. These changes include not only the re-emergence of stark differences between eastern...

Since the unification of Germany in 1990, the former communist eastern part of the country has experienced substantial levels of population decline and outmigration. These trends are largely attributable to East-West differences in economic development (May 2007). In this article, we explore the...

Population aging is an inevitable global demographic process. Most of the literature on the consequences of demographic change focuses on the economic and societal challenges that we will face as people live longer and have fewer children. In this paper, we (a) describe key trends and...

Can the 16th and early 17th centuries in Poland-Lithuania and some other east-central European countries be characterized as a “Golden Age” in human capital? We trace the development of a specific human capital indicator during this period: numeracy. We draw upon new evidence for Poland and...

This study proposes a new decomposition method which permits a difference in an aggregate measure at a final time point to be split into additive components corresponding to the initial differences in the event-rates of the measure and differences in trends in these underlying event-rates. The...

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