During the 1920s and early 1930s, fertility in American municipalities declined overall and with large variation between areas and across time. Using data for 1923-1932 on fertility and public spending for over 50 large cities, we show that the local government programs of health education and...

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...

Patterns of diversity in age at death are examined using e†, a dispersion measure that also equals the average expected lifetime lost at death. We apply two methods for decomposing differences in e†. The first method estimates the contributions of average levels of mortality and mortality...

The impact of SES on mortality is an established fact. I examine if this impact decreases with increasing age. Most research finds that it does so but it is unknown whether this decrease is due to mortality selection. The data I use come from the US-Health and Retirement Study, which surveyed...

We study inter-individual variability in number of children among women. Concentration ratio (CR) and percentile measures are used. In most countries CR has increasing from cohorts of the 1930s-40s onward due to rise in childlessness. In cohorts of the early 1960s CR varies from 0.24 to 0.46...

The aim of our paper is to provide an answer to the questions if and why social differences in health and mortality decrease with age. Most research confirms this decrease but the reasons for it and the role of unobserved heterogeneity are unknown. The data used for our analysis come from the US...

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We find significant differences in the mean age at death by month of birth on the basis of 15 million US death certificates for the years 1989 to 1997: Those born in fall live about 0.44 of a year longer than those born in spring. The difference depends on race, region of birth, marital status,...