IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp17620.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Economy, the Ghost in Your Gene and the Escape from Premature Mortality

Author

Listed:
  • Costa, Dora L.

    (UCLA)

  • Bygren, Lars Olov

    (Karolinska Institutet)

  • Graf, Benedikt

    (NBER)

  • Karlsson, Martin

    (University of Duisburg-Essen)

  • Price, Joseph

    (Brigham Young University)

Abstract

Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern economic growth to the escape from early death at older ages. Using a newly constructed multigenerational dataset for Sweden, we show that grandsons' longevity was strongly linked to spatial shocks in paternal grandfathers' yearly harvest variability when agricultural productivity was low and market integration was limited. We reason that an epigenetic mechanism is the most plausible explanation for our findings. We posit that the removal of trade barriers, improvements in transportation, and agricultural innovation reduced harvest variability. We contend that for older Swedish men (but not women) born 1830-1909 this reduction was as important as decreasing contemporaneous infectious disease rates and more important than eliminating exposure to poor harvests in-utero.

Suggested Citation

  • Costa, Dora L. & Bygren, Lars Olov & Graf, Benedikt & Karlsson, Martin & Price, Joseph, 2025. "The Economy, the Ghost in Your Gene and the Escape from Premature Mortality," IZA Discussion Papers 17620, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17620
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp17620.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    intergenerational transmission; longevity; ecomomic growth; harvest variability;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I15 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Economic Development
    • J11 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts
    • N33 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Europe: Pre-1913

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17620. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.