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This study examines the relationship between government spending and charitable activity. We present a novel way of testing the ‘crowding out hypothesis’, making use of the fact that welfare provision under the Old Poor Laws was decided at the parish level, thus giving heterogeneity within a single country. Using data on poor relief spending combined with data on charitable incomes by county before and after 1800, we find a positive relationship: areas with more public provision also enjoyed higher levels of charitable income. These results are confirmed when instrumenting for Poor Law spending and when looking at first differences.

This paper studies the effect of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic on fertility using a historical dataset from Sweden. Our results suggest an immediate reduction in fertility driven by morbidity, and additional behavioral effects driven by mortality. We find some evidence of community rebuilding and replacement fertility, but the net long-term effect is fertility reduction. In districts highly affected by the flu there is also an improvement in parental quality: we observe a relative increase in births to married women and better-off city dwellers. Our findings help understand the link between mortality and fertility, one of the central relations in demography, and show that several factors -including disruptions to marriage and labor markets -contribute to fertility reduction in the long term. Our results are consistent with studies that find a positive fertility response following natural disasters, but with high-quality historical data we show that this effect is short-lived.

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