Related papers: The long-run returns to breastfeeding
Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for…
In the past six decades, lifespan inequality has varied greatly within and among countries even while life expectancy has continued to increase. How and why does mortality change generate this diversity? We derive a precise link between…
We introduce fidelity into the bit-string Penna model for biological ageing and study the advantage of this fidelity when it produces a higher survival probability of the offspring due to paternal care. We attribute a lower reproduction…
A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. However, many species are…
The accumulation of knowledge required to produce economic value is a process that often relates to nations economic growth. Such a relationship, however, is misleading when the proxy of such accumulation is the average years of education.…
We consider a population organised hierarchically with respect to size in such a way that the growth rate of each individual depends only on the presence of larger individuals. As a concrete example one might think of a forest, in which the…
The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but…
We study the impact of teenage sports participation on early-adulthood health using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion. We focus on two primary outcomes measured at ages 23--28 -- self-rated health and total…
The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3.2 aims to reduce under-5 child mortality to 25 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2030. Child mortality tends to be concentrated in developing regions where much of the information needed to…
We study how modularity of the human brain changes as children develop into adults. Theory suggests that modularity can enhance the response function of a networked system subject to changing external stimuli. Thus, greater cognitive…
Mammographic breast density is a well-established risk factor for breast cancer. Recently there has been interest in breast MRI as an adjunct to mammography, as this modality provides an orthogonal and highly quantitative assessment of…
According to the WHO, in 2021, about 32% of pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa were infected with malaria during pregnancy. Malaria infection during pregnancy can cause various adverse birth outcomes such as low birthweight. Over the past…
Health wearables in combination with gamification enable interventions that have the potential to increase physical activity -- a key determinant of health. However, the extant literature does not provide conclusive evidence on the benefits…
Obesity is one of the leading health concerns in the United States. Researchers and health care providers are interested in understanding factors affecting obesity and detecting the likelihood of obesity as early as possible. In this paper,…
How does food consumption improve educational outcomes is an important policy issue for developing countries. Applying the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) 2014, we estimate the returns of food consumption to education and investigate…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
The majority of Swiss children attend mandatory and cost-free kindergarten at four. We examine the effect of this policy on maternal labour market outcomes. Using administrative data, we exploit the birthday cut-off for kindergarten entry…
Endogenous, ideas-led, growth theory and agent based modelling with neighbourhood effects literature are crossed. In an economic overlapping generations framework, it is shown how social interactions and neighbourhood effects are of vital…
We introduce a model of molecular evolution in which the fitness of an individual depends both on its own and on the parent's genotype. The model can be solved by means of a nonlinear mapping onto the standard quasispecies model. The…
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives;…