Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP8036
Authors: Morgan Kelly; Cormac Grada
Abstract: Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the nobility were strongly affected by harvests. Looking at a large sample of parishes after 1540, we find that the positive check had weakened considerably by 1650 even though real wages were falling, but persisted in London for another century despite its higher wages. In both cases the disappearance of the positive check coincided with the introduction of systematic poor relief, suggesting that government action played a role in breaking the link between harvest failure and mass mortality.
Keywords: positive check; mortality; living standards
JEL Codes: N33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| harvest failures (P32) | increased mortality (I12) |
| systematic poor relief (I38) | weakened positive check on mortality (I14) |
| harvest failures (P32) | mortality rates did not rise (post-1650) (J11) |
| living standards (I31) | mortality rates (I12) |
| government actions (H11) | mitigated impact of poor harvests on public health (I14) |
| local conditions (C62) | influenced mortality rates (I12) |