Working papers
Who Fed China? with Asger M. Wingender (1. version: October 2023)
China liberalized imports of agricultural goods upon its accession to the WTO in 2001, and the ensuing surge in imports became one of the largest shocks to global agriculture in the past three decades. We use variation in Chinese demand for different agricultural products to track the effects of the shock from the global level, to the country-level, and down to the municipal level in Brazil and the United States, China's main suppliers. We find that cropland expanded to meet Chinese demand to a degree that consumers elsewhere did not see higher prices. Cropland expanded mostly in areas with abundant uncultivated land and advanced commercial agriculture, and often through conversion of pasture. Yet, our evidence also indicates accelerated deforestation in places more affected by Chinese demand. Additionally, we find that Chinese demand led to larger and more profitable crop-producing farms in the United States, but with no effects on agricultural wages.Lec Echos (in French) [English version here]
communities.
School Closures, Mortality, and Human Capital: Evidence from the Universe of Closures during the 1918 Pandemic in Sweden with Christian M. Dahl, Peter S. Jensen, Martin Karlsson, and Daniel Kühnle.
This study investigates the impact of primary-school closures during the 1918 Pandemic in Sweden on mortality and the long-run outcomes of children. Combining the universe of death certificates for over 500,000 individuals from 1914 to 1920 with newly-collected archival data on school closures in more than 2,100 school districts, we employ high-frequency event studies at both weekly and daily intervals to examine the relationship between mortality and school closures. Our findings show that schools were closed in response to a local surge in influenza-related deaths two weeks prior to the closure. Next, we exploit the speed of closure and document that implementing school closures faster significantly reduced peak-level mortality rates, effectively saving the lives of primary-aged individuals. Finally, we track the long-term outcomes of the affected school children (around 100,000 per school grade) throughout their life cycle and compare them to those who were too young to attend school during the pandemic school closures. The precise estimates reveal relatively minor and mostly inconsequential effects of the closures on various outcomes, including longevity, employment, and income.CEPR DP paper
Medical technology and life expectancy: Evidence from the Antitoxin Treatment of Diphtheria with Philipp Ager and Peter Z. Lin
This paper studies the impact of the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease---antitoxin against diphtheria---on the health transition in the United States. Using an instrumental variable for local antitoxin adoption rates and information from approximately 1.6 million death certificates from 1880 to 1914, we find that the rapid diffusion of antitoxin led to a substantial decline in diphtheria mortality rates and increased life expectancy at birth. A hypothetical 10-year delay in the development of antitoxin would have reduced life expectancy at birth by one year, primarily due to reductions in child mortality. We also find that exposure to antitoxin during childhood significantly reduced school absenteeism. Our results suggest that medicine played a more important role in increasing life expectancy in the early 20th century than previously thought.CEPR DP paper
Church Membership and Social Insurance: Evidence from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 with Philipp Ager, Ezra Karger, and Lars Lønstrup. Latest version: 2016 Reject and Resubmit: Economic Journal
Religious communities are key providers of social insurance. This paper focuses on the devastating impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to investigate how an increase in the demand for social insurance affects church membership. We find a significant increase in church membership in flooded counties. This effect is stronger in counties with severe economic losses and where access to credit was limited. We also document that fundamental denominations gained more members in flooded counties, which is consistent with the theory of club goods emphasizing the efficient provision of mutual insurance in stricter religious communities.Public Spending and Inequality: Evidence from the origins of a National Redistribution Fund in Denmark with Peter Sandholt Jensen
This paper examines the local economic impacts of a national-level redistribution policy that was implemented in Denmark in 1937. The policy created a National Redistribution Fund, which partially reimbursed municipal public spending on social, school, and hospital purposes (``RD-grants''). Our analysis reveals three main findings: First, we use historical tax records to obtain detailed annual income and income-distribution data and find that the policy, as proxied by the generosity of the RD-grants, reduced income and increased equality. Second, we show that the RD-grants did not crowd out municipal spending; rather, there is evidence of crowding-in, and municipalities did not lower local taxes in response to the policy. Third, we cannot reject that the policy did not impact internal population movements and mortality outcomes. Our study sheds light on the effectiveness of national-level redistribution policies, provides insights into the early stages of the Danish welfare state, and contributes to the literature on how the public sector influences the economy.How Do We Age? A Decomposition of Gompertz Law with Holger Strulik
A strong regularity of human life is Gompertz's law, which predicts a near-perfect exponential increase in mortality with age. In this paper, we take into account that chronological age is not a cause of death and decompose Gompertz's law into two equally strong laws: (i) an exponential increase in health deficits as measured by the frailty index, and (ii) a power law association between the frailty index and the mortality rate. We show how the increase in the frailty index can be derived from the feature of self-productivity of health deficits. We explore the robustness of the Gompertz decomposition across countries, gender, and over time and show how information about mortality rates can be used to infer the state of health of an age-structured population. Finally, we use this method to infer the biological ages of past populations, such as Australian men in 1940 and Swedish men in 1770.