Typhoid Fever, Water Quality, and Human Capital Formation

Beach, Brian; Ferrie, Joseph P.; Saavedra, Martin; Troesken, Werner

doi:10.3386/w20279

Cited by 34 publications

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“…For example, Nilsson () examines a change in alcohol policy that affected binge drinking, Schwandt (2017) examines the impact of contracting influenza during pregnancy (which is preventable by vaccination), and Isen, Rossin‐Slater, and Walker () examine the long‐term effect of having been exposed to higher levels of particulate air pollution in utero or in early childhood. In a developing country context, several authors have demonstrated the effects of reducing infectious disease (Baird, Hamory Hicks, Kremer, & Miguel, ; Beach, Ferrie, Saavedra, & Troesken, ; Bhalotra & Venkataramani, ) and improving nutrition (Adhvaryu, Bednar, Molina, Nguyen, & Nyshadham, ). In an important study, Gertler et al () examined the importance of attending to psychological needs by training mothers to provide psychosocial stimulation.…”

Section: Lessons Learnedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Child health as human capital

Currie

2020

Health Economics

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Child health is increasingly understood to be a critical form of human capital, but only recently have we begun to understand how valuable it is and how its development could be better supported. This article provides an overview of recent work that demonstrates the key role of public insurance in supporting longer term human capital development and points to improvements in child mental health as an especially important mechanism.

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Section: Lessons Learnedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Child health as human capital

Currie

2020

Health Economics

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“…Beach et al . () show that the use of water purification technologies to reduce typhoid had similar benefits for human capital. Another example is provided by Almond (), which documents the long‐term effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic.…”

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confidence: 97%

Coal Smoke and Mortality in an Early Industrial Economy

Beach

Hanlon²

2017

The Economic Journal

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Air pollution was severe in the nineteenth century, yet its health consequences are often overlooked due to a lack of pollution data. We offer a new approach for inferring local coal use levels based on local industrial structure and industry-specific coal use intensity. This allows us to provide the first estimates of the mortality effects of British industrial coal use in 1851-60. Exploiting wind patterns for identification, we find that a one standard deviation increase in coal use raised infant mortality by 6-8% and that industrial coal use explains roughly one-third of the urban mortality penalty observed during this period.

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“…As these authors mention, some studies have found that for instance education, measured as compulsory schooling, reduces mortality in the United States, but not in England or France (see Cutler, Huang and Lleras-Muney (2015) and references therein). On the other hand, other studies such as Beach, Ferrie, Saavedra and Troesken (2016) examine how the declines of mortality rates due to new water purification technologies affected human capital formation. 27 We find similar results estimating equation (1) when the dependent variables (mortality measures) were specified by gender.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than one hundred years of improvements in living standards : the case of Colombia

Jaramillo-Echeverri¹,

Meisel-Roca²,

Ramírez-Giraldo³

2017

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This paper examines the long-term trends observed in the standard of living of the Colombian population during the past one hundred years, with special attention on health. We construct a historical index of human development for Colombia (HIHDC) for the 19th and 20th centuries by gender. We find that there were no major advances in living standards during the nineteenth century due to the stagnation of Colombia's GDP per capita as a result of the lack of dynamism in exports. On the contrary, significant advances in all components of the HIHDC were seen in the twentieth century, especially those for women. During the first half of the century, improvements in the quality of life were mainly driven by a higher per capita income, while improvements after the 1950s were driven by greater public investment, for example, in education and health. Next, we analyze health achievements, considering health is one of the components of the HIHDC that has been less studied in the Colombian economic history literature. We construct a new dataset using statistics reported by the Colombian government, which included annual information on the main diseases and causes of mortality during the period of 1916-2014 disaggregated by territorial units. The data show that the percentage of deaths from tuberculosis, pneumonia, and gastrointestinal diseases decreased significantly throughout the century. On the contrary, deaths caused by cancer and heart diseases have increased considerably in recent decades. Results from difference-in-difference models show that the decline in the total mortality rate and in the mortality rate for waterborne diseases was largely related with the expansion in the provision of public goods, namely aqueducts and sewerage services.

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Typhoid Fever, Water Quality, and Human Capital Formation

Cited by 34 publications

References 0 publications

Child health as human capital

Child health as human capital

Coal Smoke and Mortality in an Early Industrial Economy

More than one hundred years of improvements in living standards : the case of Colombia

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