LSE Historical Demography Workshop 2021

Friday June 18th, 2pm-6pm, on Zoom

Organised by Neil Cummins and Eric Schneider

[email protected]
[email protected]

Programme

Friday June 18th 2021

2.00-2.10 Welcome and Introductions

2.10-2.45 Geographies of Morbidity in the United Kingdom, 1893-1908 Harry Smith (Kingston University)

2.45-3.20 The Intergenerational Impacts on Health of Gestational Exposure to the Introduction of the National Health Service in the UK Genevieve Ann Jeffrey (LSE)

3.20-3.55 Multigenerational effects of smallpox vaccination Volha Lazuka (SDU)

3.55-4.15 Break

4.15-4.50 The effects of geography and education on fertility behaviour: The case of Colombia in 1973 Juliana Jaramillo-Echeverri (LSE)

4.50-5.25 The Causal Effect of Education on Female Age at Marriage and Marital Fertility: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Reforms in England Neil Cummins (LSE)

5.25-6.00 Culture and the Historical Fertility Transition Walker Hanlon (NYU, Stern)

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Detailed Programme

Friday June 18th 2021

2.00-2.10 Welcome and Introductions

2.10-2.45

Geographies of Morbidity in the United Kingdom, 1893-1908

Harry Smith (Kingston University)

This paper uses a novel dataset to examine the geography of ill health in the United Kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century. The Chief Medical Officer of the United Kingdom Post Office produced annual reports that, from the 1890s onwards, provided data on the incidence and duration of sick leave, broken down by gender and occupation, for 685 post offices in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. This paper uses these data to examine the geography of ill health in the entirety of the United Kingdom for the first time, at a key moment in the epidemiological transition. It considers how both the attributes of the postal workforce in each location, and the socio-economic and environmental characteristics of different locations affected the rates of sick leave reported by the Chief Medical Officer. The paper begins with a consideration of the source, its strengths and weaknesses compared to previous work on the geography of morbidity. It then examines data drawn from four reports, 1893, 1898, 1903 and 1908, to illustrate the general geography of morbidity and how it changed during this period, and the differences in rates by gender. It models how sickness rates and duration varied by workforce size and composition and how these related to contextual variables including location, population density, urban/rural, occupational structure, rateable values and mortality rates. The paper closes with preliminary conclusions about the relationship between place and morbidity during the epidemiological transition and a discussion of avenues for further research.

2.45-3.20

The Intergenerational Impacts on Health of Gestational Exposure to the Introduction of the National Health Service in the UK

Genevieve Ann Jeffrey (LSE)

The introduction of the National Health Service on the 5th of July 1948 in the UK meant free access to healthcare for all residents. This free access to healthcare would have made healthcare more accessible especially to those of the lower socioeconomic status. In this paper I study the intergenerational health impacts of gestational exposure to the introduction of the National Health Service by studying the impact on the health outcomes of the second and third generations of those born around the introduction of the NHS. Using linked census data, I construct multi-generational family units and using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, using the date of birth to assign treatment, I study the impact on the education and birth outcomes, self-reported health outcomes and cancer incidence of the treated, the children and grandchildren of those exposed during gestation to the NHS introduction. I find negative impacts on the second and third generations health outcomes and positive impacts on the first, second and third generations education and employment outcomes for those of the lower socioeconomic status. I also analyse the impact it would have had on health mobility across generations by analysing how the parents health and education outcomes would impact those of their children and to study if there was indeed persistence of outcomes across generations, if this persistence would be impacted by the introduction of the NHS, since the persistence of poor health and educational outcomes are more prevalent in those of the lower socio-economic status and since the NHS introduction would have disproportionately benefitted this group, I would expect an increase in educational and health mobility across generations. This is the key focus of the paper. The main research question the thesis will try to answer is if policy interventions or programs can reduce the disparities by socioeconomic group in the persistence of poor health outcomes across generations. Can positive investments reduce the intergenerational transmission of poor health outcomes? Recent work in epidemiology finds that environmental factors can affect the gene expression (phenotype to phenotype transmission )This strengthens the case for investigating how policies, which proxy the environment, can impact second and third generations health outcomes. Thinking about the body of work on the fetal origins hypothesis and early childhood impacts on later life outcomes, together with the existing body of work that finds an intergenerational persistence of health outcomes suggests that any interventions made targeting the period of gestation and early childhood cannot be fully evaluated without considering the implications across generations. The literature is handicapped in examining the long run consequences of policy changes, down to the next generation due to the difficulty of following people across such a large number of years, and across generations. The literature is somewhat limited to studying the immediate impacts of policy changes and understanding the intergenerational impact of these policy changes would lend some credence to the necessity for implementing these policies. This is important because cost benefit analysis of policy interventions tend to account only for the benefits in the short run, within the first generation. If there are indeed second and third generation impacts, we as a society could be under investing. To answer these questions, across the three research questions, I use an exceptional dataset, the Office of National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS LS) . The ONS LS links census records to life events of the members, including live and still births to sample mothers, infant mortality, deaths and cancer registrations. At each point there are over 500,000 usual residents who populate the study. This constitutes a 1% representative sample of the population in England and Wales. The large sample size allows for a level of precision that other studies on intergenerational mobility are unable to afford. The existing studies on intergenerational associations of health in the UK use British cohort studies and are an order of magnitude smaller than the dataset I use.

3.20-3.55

Multigenerational effects of smallpox vaccination

Volha Lazuka (SDU)

We explore the multigenerational effects of smallpox vaccination on mortality over two centuries. Unique individual level data of high quality from Sweden covering 1760 to 1960 allow us to investigate whether and how vaccination affected the first generation of vaccinated and whether these effects persisted to the second and third generation. We apply several methods of causal inference, such as the instrumental-variables and sibling fixed-effects methods, to high-quality longitudinal individual-level data for 49 parishes and find similar effects across methods. Our results show that smallpox vaccination improved survival of the first generation by 10.5 years, and that these effects, with a reduced magnitude, persisted to the second and third generation.

3.55-4.15 Break

4.15-4.50

The effects of geography and education on fertility behaviour: The case of Colombia in 1973

Juliana Jaramillo-Echeverri (LSE)

Colombia experienced one of the fastest declines in fertility in the world: children per woman fell from 7 in 1960 to 3 in 1985. Despite the stark inequalities of the country, the regional character of the decline has been neglected in previous research. This paper assess the role of culture, geography and education during the Colombian fertility transition. Using individual-level data from the complete census of 1973 and Local Indicators of Spatial Association this paper uncovers pre-transition low and high fertility geographical clusters. Using the Own Child Method this paper provides new fertility estimations for women living in these clusters. The results confirm that between 1958-1970 fertility evolved at a different pace across the country but after 1964 fertility declined at a similar rate in zones with different cultural and historical backgrounds. The results suggest that by 1973 strategies to limit fertility (e.g. starting, stopping) were widespread and were mainly affected by the educational level of a woman, but not so much by her context (e.g. urbanisation). Furthermore, the effect of education is similar across the different contexts and the fertility gap between the lowest and highest educated women existed during the fertility transition while secondary education seems to be the main driver of the gradient.

4.50-5.25

The Causal Effect of Education on Female Age at Marriage and Marital Fertility: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Reforms in England

Neil Cummins (LSE)

The negative association of female education and fertility, over time and between countries, is a central pillar of demography yet we have scant empirical evidence for whether this consistently observed correlation represents a causal effect. Using the universe of vital registration index data from England, 1912 to 2007, I first show that it is possible, using rare names, to construct a representative sample of women, and their first marriage and fertility. I then exploit the natural experiment of sharp discontinuities in who was affected by compulsory schooling law changes in 1947 and 1972, which exogenously raised the minimum school leaving age, to identify the causal effect of education on age at marriage and marital fertility. I find evidence that education raises age at marriage in 1972. However, I precisely estimate a zero education effect on fertility.

5.25-6.00

Culture and the Historical Fertility Transition

Walker Hanlon (NYU, Stern)

The historical transition to a low fertility regime was central for long-run growth, but what caused it? Existing explanations largely focus on the economic incentives to have children. This paper presents new evidence highlighting the importance of cultural forces as a distinct driver of the fertility transition. We leverage a sharp change in fertility in Britain in 1877 and document large synchronized declines in fertility among culturally-British households residing outside of Britain, in Canada, the U.S. and South Africa, relative to their non-British neighbors. We propose a plausible catalyst for the change: the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial of 1877