EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Typhoid Fever, Water Quality, and Human Capital Formation

Brian Beach, Joseph Ferrie, Martin Saavedra () and Werner Troesken

The Journal of Economic History, 2016, vol. 76, issue 1, 41-75

Abstract: New water purification technologies led to large mortality declines by helping eliminate typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. We examine how this affected human capital formation using early-life typhoid fatality rates to proxy for water quality. We merge city-level data to individuals linked between the 1900 and 1940 Censuses. Eliminating early-life exposure to typhoid fever increased later-life earnings by one percent and educational attainment by one month. Instrumenting for typhoid fever using typhoid rates from cities that lie upstream produces results nine times larger. The increase in earnings from eliminating typhoid fever more than offset the cost of elimination.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Typhoid Fever, Water Quality, and Human Capital Formation (2014) Downloads
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:cup:jechis:v:76:y:2016:i:01:p:41-75_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Journal of Economic History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:76:y:2016:i:01:p:41-75_00