We analyse the role of modern water infrastructure in reducing infant mortality in Finnish cities and towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Estimates from US data suggest that urban water infrastructures greatly affected the health transition in Western countries, implying policy lessons for developing countries. Finland is a relevant case due to the early onset of mortality decline in a predominantly agrarian context in a country with a low GDP. Our sources enable analysis across population centres of varying size as well as over different phases of development. We construct panel data on infant mortality and the initiation of three major water interventionspiped water, sewers and chlorinationin 37 Finnish cities and towns from approximately 1870 to 1938. We show that in line with previous literature, the interventions had a significant effect on infant mortality, jointly accounting for roughly 40% of the average decrease in different cities. However, most of the measurable effect was driven by small-and medium-sized cities adopting more advanced technology in the twentieth century rather than by pioneering larger cities in the nineteenth century. Weighting by population size rather than using average effects reduces the estimate to about 32%. Due to low levels of urbanisation, the measurable impact on national mortality decline was only about 4-5 % over the entire period, but roughly twice as high in the twentieth century, when both urbanisation and a decline in urban infant mortality rates gathered pace. Following development economics, our findings emphasise the importance of distinguishing the effects of sanitation by period and developmental context rather than compressing them into a single estimate.

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Apart from the commonly emphasized historical or cultural explanations, was there an economics behind the early, extensive schooling of girls in Europe's Nordic periphery? This article analyses factors behind the emerging female majority in secondary schooling in early twentieth century Finland through resource allocation within households. We argue that a significant part of the female educational advantage can be explained with a classic unitary Beckerian schooling investment model. We apply an Engel specification widely used in development economics to a household budget dataset from the 1920s to estimate the effect of the age and gender of children on schooling investment across social groups. We find a pro-girl bias among households of low socio-economic status, explained primarily by the sizable penalty to boys caused by opportunity costs and expected returns. Worker boys could generate significant income from an early age, making their education initially expensive for cash-constrained families. Contrary to previous claims, the dropout rates of boys were also higher than those of girls. Together with a propensity to leave home earlier, this lowered the expected net returns to schooling. Meanwhile, the expansion of modern services created attractive job opportunities for secondary educated girls. We find no evidence of intrahousehold bargaining. The findings resemble certain cases in development economics and the economic history of advanced countries including the USA. Rather than matching with patterns of anti-girl discrimination in many developing countries, our results highlight the prehistory of the currently emerging pattern of female educational advantage-and male disadvantage-in OECD countries.Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

Due to their role in discussions on community solidarity and social security in rich and poor countries alike, informal transfers between households have gradually become established as a research topic in economic and social history. Qualitative research has tended to emphasize the female-dominated nature of informal assistance. While research on intra-household resource allocation has demonstrated the potential for discerning gendered outcomes with household level data, quantitative research on informal assistance tends to ascribe a singular, "family" logic to transfers. Using an early 20th century Finnish household budget survey, this article analyses the differences in the statistical determinants of the reception of informal transfers in cash and in kind in the context of gendered household economy. Record linkage and statistical inference are utilized to reveal the sources of the different types of transfers and show how they were related to the position and welfare of men, women and children within households. The transfers in cash were actually controlled by men in the male breadwinner families of the data, exhibited elements of informal insurance, and were linked to trade union membership. The transfers in kind appeared to be the realm of particularly those women who were mainly engaged in unpaid work in households. At the same time, however, they were linked to outbound reciprocity in cash, indicating implicit dependence on male earnings.

The literature on intrahousehold allocation in European history has typically built on bargaining models originating from Amartya Sen and the South Asian "missing girls" paradigm, testing hypotheses of male earner bias. Often, a 50/50 benchmark has been used, assuming any skew in spending meant discrimination. This study combines external measures of variation in morbidity by age, sex and season with analysis of household health expenditure in Finland in the 1920s. The results suggest that money largely followed sickness rather than gender or earnings. This supports an emerging literature challenging bargaining models and suggesting that significant historical differences may have existed between world regions.