Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/314517 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 17620
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
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.
Subjects: 
intergenerational transmission
longevity
ecomomic growth
harvest variability
JEL: 
I15
J11
N33
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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