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.

Mission-oriented organizations rely on social incentives in the absence of high-powered pecuniary incentives. We argue that agents’ motivation is influenced by the presence of principals with whom they share a regional identity. When this representation is lost, motivation declines. Our case study—the trenches of World War I—offers a unique setting to observe both regional identity and performance. To identify the causal effect of officer-soldier (principal-agent) representation loss, we exploit within-regiment variation, using mortality as a proxy for motivation. We find that soldiers’ mortality rates decreased following the death of an officer from their birth region. Placebo treatments confirm that this effect is driven by the loss of shared regional identity rather than other confounding factors. Finally, we examine heterogeneity in this effect, identifying the regional and organizational characteristics that attenuate it.

Reproductive inequality --- the fertility differential between poor and rich couples --- together with intergenerational mobility shapes class structure. Still, few studies evaluate these dynamics in a joint framework. Evolutionary growth theories such as Galor & Moav (2002) or Clark (2007) argue that fertility differentials contributed to the spread of certain growth-enhancing traits, eventually resulting in modern economic growth. However, they do not explicitly account for regression to the mean in economic status. By leveraging the demographic records of 150,000 individuals from pre-industrial Germany, I estimate reproductive inequality and social mobility. High status couples had more surviving children, with their status closely related to their parents' position in the socio-economic distribution. By combining my estimates of reproductive inequality and social mobility I simulate an overlapping generation model to explore the parameter space that enables the demographic mechanisms that underpin evolutionary growth theories.