Did improved housing conditions contribute to the 19th century mortality transition? In this paper we examine a rare example of a public health intervention in rural areas, namely the large-scale provision of social housing in Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We exploit a novel dataset of deaths-by-disease, deaths-by-age and the implementation of the house building scheme across local districts over the period 1870-1919, to test the impact of the intervention on mortality. Both two-way fixed-effects and novel difference-in-difference estimators show that areas that received more cottages experienced a larger decline in disease mortality over subsequent decades. Our estimates indicate that improved housing conditions may account for up to 40 % of the rural mortality decline in this period. This effect is driven by reductions in deaths from respiratory diseases. A causal interpretation is supported by falsification tests on deaths from non-communicable diseases and through an analysis using age-at-death and death-by-gender data. Beyond indicating that large-scale capital public health interventions can be effective in a rural setting, our results add to the literature of the European mortality transition and provide important causal evidence on the link between housing conditions and health outcomes.

Individual level records of every French war-time fatality in the Great War enable us to explore the organisational implications of group representation. At the level of regiments, we explore how being commanded by officers from one’s home region impacts performance. We find that soldiers were more motivated when their superiors shared their regional identity. Notably we find that this effect only holds for regional minorities within the regiment, and that it is attenuated by greater diversity.