The Economic and Demographic Transition, Mortality, and Comparative Development

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may January 2010Abstract. Evidence from economics, anthropology and biology testifies to a fundamental household trade-off between the number of offspring (quantity) and amount of nutrition per child (quality). This leads to a theory of pre-industrial growth where body size as well as population size is endogenous. But when productive quality investments are undertaken the historical constancy of income per capita seems puzzling. Why didn't episodes of rising income instigate a virtuous circle of rising body size and productivity? To address this question we propose that societies are subject to a "physiological check": if human body size rises, metabolic needs -our conceptualization of "subsistence requirements" -rise.This mechanism turns out to be instrumental in explaining why income growth does not take hold and societies remain near an endogenously determined subsistence boundary.When we use the theory to shed light on pre-industrial cross-country income differences we find that 60-70% of the income differences in 1500 can plausibly be accounted for by variations in subsistence requirements.

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The longevity of famous people from Hammurabi to Einstein

Croix

Licandro

2015

J Econ Growth

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We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive biographical tool. Our main contribution is fourfold. First, we show, using for the first time a worldwide, long-running, consistent database, that there was no trend in mortality rates during the Malthusian era. Second, after correcting for selection and composition biases, we date the beginning of the steady improvements in longevity to the cohort born in 1640-9, clearly preceding the Industrial Revolution. Third, we find that this timing of improvements in longevity concerns most countries in Europe, as well as all types of skilled occupations. Finally, the reasons for this early increase in mean lifetime are related to age-dependent shifts in the survival law.JEL Classification Numbers: J11, I12, N30, I20, J24.

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The Economic and Demographic Transition, Mortality, and Comparative Development

Cited by 8 publications

References 61 publications

The effect of life expectancy on education and population dynamics

The effect of life expectancy on education and population dynamics

The physiological foundations of the wealth of nations

The longevity of famous people from Hammurabi to Einstein

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