عنوان

Essays on Income and Health

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انگلیسی

Essays on Income and Health

[Thesis]

Eli, Shari Jane

Eichengreen, Barry

UC Berkeley

2011

UC Berkeley

2011

In the three chapters of this dissertation, I examine the effects of changes in income on health measures for three different populations. Each of the three populations live in countries with developing economies: Whites in the post-bellum U.S.; black ex- slaves and freedmen upon Emancipation in the U.S., and individuals living in Indian households at the end of the 20th century. In the first and second chapters, I look at the effect of unearned income on morbidity and mortality, while in the third, I investigate how spatial and temporal differences in energy requirements affected food consumption at the end of the 20th century in India. Taken together, the three chapters focus on the effects of income on individual health measures.In the first essay, I investigate how increases in individual income contributed to improvements in adult health during the late 19th and early 20th century. To disentangle the effect of income as opposed to medical advancements or public health interventions, I use exogenous variation in income from the first wide-scale entitlement program in the United States: the Union Army pensions. Documenting that Republican Congressional candidates boosted veterans pensions in order to secure votes, I exploit exogenous increases in income stemming from Republican corruption to estimate income effects on morbidity and mortality. The effects of income on disease onset are large - an extra

Eli, Shari Jane

Eichengreen, Barry

UC Berkeley

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y