There is a substantial debate over the direction of the causal relation between income and health. This is important for our understanding of the health production process and for the policy debate over improving healthcare. We instrument income with rainfall measurements by matching satellite information on timing and positioning of 21 rainfall stations to longitudinal data (1991-94) of over 4...

Measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries. We use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels. We find that our instrumented incomes explain the cross-country pattern of corruption just as well as do actual incomes. This result demonstrates that the long-run causality is entirely from income to corruption. Hence, there is a Corrupt...

Are the Neolithic revolution’s effects still impacting incomes across the world today? I find strong support for this proposition using new, country-specific estimates of the timing of agricultural transition. While support with my data is slightly weaker than with the coarser data of Hibbs and Olsson (2004), I provide evidence that the differences are due to how technological diffusion is acco...

When it is compared to other premodern societies, ihe Greek world, in 800-300 BC, was prosperous. The Greek economy grew (both in the aggregate and per capita) at a hight rate by premodern standards (although growth was feeble by modern standards). By the fourth century BC Hellas was comparatively densely populated and highly urbanized. Incomes of working people were high (at least in Athens) a...

Increasing levels of financial inequality prompt questions about the relationship between income and well-being. Using a twins sample from the Survey of Midlife Development in the U. S. and controlling for personality as core self-evaluations (CSE), we found that men, but not women, had higher subjective financial well-being (SFWB) when they had higher incomes. This relationship was due to 'uns...

This paper presents evidence that reductions in mortgage interest rates associated with prepayment penalties are greater for riskier borrowers, as measured by mortgage type, credit scores, and local incomes and education levels. This is consistent with an efficiency view that, by reducing the reclassification risk faced by lenders, prepayment penalties can be welfareimproving. Additional findin...

This article examines selected benefit characteristics--primary insurance amount, entitlement status, and actuarial reduction--of women aged 62 and over and the relationship between these characteristics and the receipt of income from other sources and the size of total income in 1971. Special attention is given to age variations in beneficiary and income factors and to the comparatively disadv...

The Medicare program is on the verge of major change. The proof of the value of reforms will not rest in how well the program meets the needs of the healthy and wealthy, but rather in whether they preserve or improve upon protections for those who would not be well served by an unregulated private sector--persons with low incomes and/or substantial health problems. This paper examines four key ...

Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high...

The implementation of the 1986 Social Security Act in April 1988 marked an important milestone in the development of financial support for children. Confronted by a substantial body of evidence which showed that poverty is most extreme among families with children,' 2 the government has chosen to shift the balance of support away from pensioners, single people, and higher income families toward...