When Beer Is Safer than Water: Beer Availability and Mortality from Waterborne Illnesses

Francisca M. Antman () and James Flynn
Additional contact information
Francisca M. Antman: University of Colorado, Boulder

No 17164, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate the impact of beer on mortality during the Industrial Revolution in 18th century England. Due to the brewing process, beer represented an improvement over available water sources during this period prior to the widespread understanding of the link between water quality and human health. Using a wide range of identification strategies to derive measures of beer scarcity driven by tax increases, weather events, and soil quality, we show that beer scarcity was associated with higher mortality, especially in the summer months when mortality was more likely to be driven by waterborne illnesses related to contaminated drinking water. We also leverage variation in inherent water quality across parishes using two proxies for water quality to show that beer scarcity resulted in greater deaths in areas with worse water quality. Together, the evidence indicates that beer had a major impact on human health during this important period in economic development.

Keywords: beer; water quality; industrial revolution; mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 N33 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2024-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env, nep-gro, nep-hea and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Journal of Development Economics, 2024, 171, 103343

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17164.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: When beer is safer than water: Beer availability and mortality from waterborne illnesses (2024)
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:iza:izadps:dp17164

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().