INTRODUCTION One principal aim of tobacco control programs is the prevention of smoking initiation. Adolescent smoking prevalence peaked during the 1940s for males and during the early1970s for females. Since the 1940s, there has been a substantial decline in smoking prevalence among adolescent males. However, during the 1980s, the decline in prevalence stopped and began to level. The decline f...

I examine why South Africa's pioneering Pholela model of primary health care, dating from the 1940s, held such appeal for the country's new policymakers after 1994, and why those policymakers have failed to make it the basis of an effective public health care system since then. In the 1940s, the innovative Pholela experiment had served as such a model, to be replicated gradually throughout the ...

The 1940s were a decade of sharp contraction in wage inequality, particularly at the top of the distribution. We study this narrowing using a new dataset on the compensation of top executives. Relative to average earnings, median executive pay declined 0.34 log points from 1940 to 1949. We find that government regulation—including explicit salary restrictions and taxation—had, at best, a modest...

Background: Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has been an important cause of bone infection since the 1940s. Current guidelines recommend targeted antibiotic use for osteomyelitis treatment informed by microbial sensitivity patterns. However, in settings without microbiology facilities, empirical antibiotic use is common. Unrecognized antibiotic resistance potentiates persisten...

Bonds are traded in over-the-counter markets, where opacity and fragmentation imply large transaction costs for retail investors. Is there something special about bonds, in contrast to stocks, precluding transparent limit-order markets? Historical experience suggests this is not the case. Before WWII, there was an active market in corporate and municipal bonds on the NYSE. Activity dropped dram...

This paper studies the trends in height-by-age across socioeconomic groups of Chilean boys aged 5-18 born between 1880 and 1997, by performing a meta-analysis of 38 studies reporting height-by-age published since 1898. We estimate the trends using quantile regressions and by analyzing detailed height data from five selected studies. Both methods yield an average decennial increase in height of ...