Grant Miller (Stanford Medical School and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER))
Abstract
Women's choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men. This paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. Consistent with standard models of electoral competition, suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, and child mortality declined by 8-15% (or 20,000 annual child deaths nationwide) as cause-specific reductions occurred exclusively among infectious childhood killers sensitive to hygienic conditions. (c) 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)