Experiments indicate that adult role-modeling of giving has a causal effect on giving done by children, but a previous investigation using data from a natural setting suggests zero causal effect of parent role-modeling on their adolescents' giving. This article presents new evidence about the divergent findings: (i) parent giving does not automatically translate into adolescents knowing that their parents give, and (ii) adolescents are much less likely to know that their parents give if parents give from time-to-time. The results suggest new experimental designs that randomize (a) the frequency of role-modeling, (b) communication approaches that explain role-modeling actions to children, and (c) whether the receiving organization is in-group or out-group. The practical implications of the results are that frequent giving by a parent is necessary for adolescents to successfully 'receive' the role model, but may not be sufficient. Purposeful communication is needed to ensure that adolescents know that their parents are giving.

The Great Recession was associated with large changes in income, wealth, and unemployment, changes that affected many lives. Since January 2008, the Gallup Organization has been collecting daily data on 1,000 Americans each day, with a range of self-reported well-being (SWB) questions. I use these data to examine how the recession affected the emotional and evaluative lives of the population, as well as of subgroups within it. In the fall of 2008, around the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and lasting into the spring of 2009, at the bottom of the stock market, Americans reported sharp declines in their life evaluation, sharp increases in worry and stress, and declines in positive affect. By the end of 2010, in spite of continuing high unemployment, these measures had largely recovered, though worry remained higher and life evaluation lower than in January 2008. The SWB measures do a much better job of monitoring short-run levels of anxiety as the crisis unfolded than they do of reflecting the evolution of the economy over a year or two. Even large macroeconomic shocks to income and unemployment can be expected to produce only small and hard to detect effects on SWB measures. SWB, particularly evaluation of life as a whole, is sensitive to question order effects. Asking political questions before the life evaluation question reduces reported life evaluation by an amount that dwarfs the effects of even the worst of the crisis; these order effects persist deep into the interview, and condition the reporting of hedonic experience and of satisfaction with standard of living. Methods for controlling these effects need to be developed and tested if national measures are to be comparable over space and time.

This paper investigates the effects of inequality in health on economic growth in low and middle income countries. The empirical part of the paper uses an original cross-national panel data set covering 62 low and middle income countries over the period 1985 to 2007. I find a substantial and relatively robust negative effect of health inequality on income levels and income growth controlling for life expectancy, country and time fixed-effects and a large number of other effects that have been shown to matter for growth. The effect also holds if health inequality is instrumented to circumvent a potential problem of reverse causality. Hence, reducing inequality in the access to health care and to health-related information can make a substantial contribution to economic growth.

The recent literature proposes many variables as significant determinants of pollution. This paper gives an overview of this literature and asks which of these factors have an empirically robust impact on water and air pollution. We apply Extreme Bound Analysis (EBA) on a panel of up to 120 countries covering the period 1960–2001. We find supportive evidence of the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve for water pollution. Furthermore, mainly variables capturing the economic structure of a country affect air and water pollution.

The 1930s witnessed an intense struggle between gas and electricity suppliers for the working class market, where the incumbent utility—gas—was also a reasonably efficient (and cheaper) General Purpose Technology for most domestic uses. Local monopolies for each supplier boosted substitution effects between fuel types—as alternative fuels constituted the only local competition. Using newly-rediscovered returns from a major national household expenditure survey, we employ geographically-determined instrumental variables, more commonly used in the industrial organization literature, to show that gas provided a significant competitor, tempering electricity prices, while electricity demand was also responsive to marketing initiatives.

This paper shows that under weather variability the transformation from a rural to an incomplete market economy can increase the vulnerability of peasants to famine. This can occur even if improvements in technology have raised agricultural productivity and made production less responsive to weather variability. Indeed, negative environmental shocks can produce a drop in wages that outweighs the increase in wages due to an equivalent positive environmental shock. Consequently, the amount of grain stored increases more slowly in good seasons than it decreases in bad ones. This paper gives new insights on the catastrophic effects produced by widespread droughts in India during the second half of the 19th century. Notwithstanding the introduction of new modes of production and the modernization of infrastructures, the interaction between environmental variability and new institutional arrangements might have contributed to increase the vulnerability of peasants to famine.

We estimate the reduction, almost to elimination, of absolute poverty among working households in urban Britain between 1904 and 1937. We exploit two recently-digitized data sets. The paper presents a statistical generalization, to working families in the whole of urban Britain, of the poverty decline found in the town studies by, amongst other, Bowley and Rowntree. We offer corroborative evidence and perform a simulated decomposition of the poverty reduction into its proximate causes. The two most important causes were the rise, 1904–37, of about 30% in real wages on the one hand and the reduction of one-third in the number of people in the average household over the same period. Between them, these two changes imply a near doubling of the income per capita of an average household supported by a worker on the average wage. We conclude with a discussion of deeper causes.