The Political Economy of Health and Healthcare

Does democracy make taller men? Cross-country European evidence

“…Consistently with other work in the literature (Batinti et al, 2020), we find that democracy exerts a large effect on male heights, we estimate that exposure to democracy 13 While we cannot rule out that there might be bias in heights self-reporting, (Ng, 2019), we were not able to find literature proving that democracies show a larger upward bias than autocracies. Even in the case where we cannot rule out cultural factors, the respondents from the 21 countries in the ESS7 are relatively high in democracies' scores.…”

“…Given that height is fixed from young adulthood until an individual's early fifties when human bodies start experiencing shrinking (Stinson, 1985;Beard and Blaser, 2002), studies examining changes in human stature have the advantage of ruling out the confounding effects of a whole series of omitted variables that could bias the estimates. This could also explain why part of the literature finds no or even slightly negative correlation between democracy and health, especially so when infant or child mortality is used as its indicator (Costa-Font et al, 2020).…”

Intergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution

“…Columns 1 and 6 focus on how respondents want to allocate the country's budget between two different spending categories: "Opportunities," which includes spending on schooling and higher education, as well as public spending on health (categories 3 and 6); 22 and "Safety Net," which includes social insurance and income support programs (category 5 in the survey questionnaire, as described in Section I). Column 2 shows support for the estate tax.…”

The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV

“…1980 1985 1991 1987 1992 1994-2013 1990 Berlusconi starts to broadcast , 1980-1994 frequency-planning purposes and allows to accurately predict signal strength across narrow geographical cells (Phillips, Sicker, and Grunwald 2011). 12 Following Olken (2009), we compute the signal loss between each Mediaset transmitter and each of Italy's 8,100 municipalities (comune) using the ITM algorithm. 13 For each municipality-transmitter pair, we subtract the signal loss from the transmission power to obtain the predicted signal strength at the receiving location, in decibels (dB).…”