Long-Run Health Impacts of Income Shocks: Wine and Phylloxera in Nineteenth-Century France

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Gilles Postel-Vinay and Tim Watts
Additional contact information
Tim Watts: NERA

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010, vol. 92, issue 4, 714-728

Abstract: Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed 40% of French vineyards. Using the regional variation in the timing of this shock, we identify and examine the effects on adult height, health, and life expectancy of children born in the years and regions affected by the phylloxera. The shock decreased long-run height, but it did not affect other dimensions of health, including life expectancy. We find that those born in affected regions were about 1.8 millimeters shorter than others at age 20, a significant effect since average heights grew by only 2 centimeters in the entire nineteenth century. (c) 2010 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (133)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00024 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:92:y:2010:i:4:p:714-728

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().