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Temperature, Disease, and Death in London: Analyzing Weekly Data for the Century from 1866 to 1965

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2021

W. Walker Hanlon ,
Casper Worm Hansen  and
Jake Kantor
W. Walker Hanlon
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, New York University Stern School of Business – Economics, New York, NY10012, and NBER, 1050 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: [email protected]
Casper Worm Hansen
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, København, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected].
Jake Kantor
Affiliation:
Ph.D. Student, New York University Stern School of Business – Economics, New York, NY10012. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 40 - 80
Copyright
© The Economic History Association 2021

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Footnotes

We thank Vellore Arthi, Alan Barreca, Brian Beach, Robert Margo, Andrew Oswald, the Editor, William Collins, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the European Economic Association Meeting, the Copenhagen Business School Inequality Platform’s First Workshop on Climate Change and Inequality, and the 5th Annual Meeting of the Danish Society for Economic and Social History for their helpful comments. Funding for this project was provided by National Science Foundation CAREER Grant No. 1552692.

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