The Captain of the Men of Death and His Shadow: Long-Run Impacts of Early Life Pneumonia Exposure

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases in schooling, income, and the probability of employment, and reductions in disability rates. These improvements were larger for those born in states with higher pre-intervention levels of pneumonia as these were the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. These estimates are, in general, larger and more robust to specification for men than for women. With the exception of cognitive disability and poverty for men, the estimates for African Americans are smaller and less precisely estimated than those for whites. This is despite our finding that African Americans experienced larger absolute reductions in pneumonia mortality after the arrival of sulfa. We suggest that pre-Civil Rights barriers may have inhibited their translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment.early childhood, infectious diseases, pneumonia, medical innovation, antibiotics, schooling, income, disability, mortality trends

Technical Efficiency in Agricultural Production and Its Determinants : An Exploratory Study at the District Level

Given the importance of agriculture to the well being of a large percentage of Indias population, it becomes important to study how improvements can be made in the productivity of this sector. This study attempts to estimate the technical efficiency a measure of how well inputs are being used towards producing output of about 250 Indian districts in 1990-91. It employs the stochastic frontier function methodology. The results indicate that (i) the land elasticity is the highest followed by fertilizer; (ii) the mean efficiency of raising agricultural output is 79 per cent and therefore there is a scope for increasing output by 21 per cent without additional resources; (iii) states such as Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan have the largest number of districts with below average TE and they stand to gain the most from policy interventions towards improving technical efficiency. The results further indicate that health, education, and infrastructure are powerful drivers of efficiency at the district level and the relative importance of the determinants of efficiency across districts depends greatly on environmental factors, such as agro-climatic zones, technological factors, and crop mix. The results highlight the need for developing policy strategies at a more localized level.agriculture, technical efficiency, stochastic frontier function, India

The captain of the men of death and his shadow: Long-run impacts of early life pneumonia exposure

We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the causal impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases in schooling, income, and the probability of employment, and reductions in disability rates. These improvements were larger for those born in states with higher pre-intervention levels of pneumonia as these were the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. These estimates are, in general, larger and more robust to specification for men than for women. With the exception of cognitive disability and poverty for men, the estimates for African Americans are smaller and less precisely estimated than those for whites. This is despite our finding that African Americans experienced larger absolute reductions in pneumonia mortality after the arrival of sulfa. We suggest that pre-Civil Rights barriers may have inhibited their translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment

Gender Differences in Investments and Outcomes

Note: The Discussion Papers in this series are prepared by members of the Department of Economics, University of Essex, for private circulation to interested readers. They often represent preliminary reports on work in progress and should therefore be neither quoted nor referred to in published work without the written consent of the author. Cognitive Development and Infectious Disease

Cognitive Development and Infectious Disease: Gender Differences in Investments and Outcomes

We exploit exogenous variation in the risk of waterborne disease created by implementation of a major water reform in Mexico in 1991 to investigate impacts of infant exposure on indicators of cognitive development and academic achievement in late childhood. We estimate that a one standard deviation reduction in childhood diarrhea mortality rates results in about a 0.1 standard deviation increase in test scores, but only for girls. We show that a reason for the gender differentiated impacts is that the water reform induces parents to make complementary investments in education that favor girls, consistent with their comparative advantage in skilled occupations. The results provide novel evidence of the potential for clean water provision to narrow test score gaps across countries and, within countries, across gender

Creative benefits from well-connected leaders? Leader social network ties as facilitators of employee radical creativity

Employee radical creativity critically depends on substantive informational resources from others across the wider organization. We propose that the social network ties of employees’ immediate leaders assume a central role in garnering these resources, thereby fostering their employees’ radical creativity both independent of and interactively with employees’ own network ties. Drawing on data from 214 employees working in 30 teams of a public technology and environmental services organization, we find that team leaders’ betweenness centrality in the idea network within their teams as well as among their peer leaders provides creative benefits beyond employees’ own internal and external ties. Further, employees’ and leaders’ ties within and external to the team interactively predict employee radical creativity. Implications for theory and practice are discusse

Cognitive Development and Infectious Disease: Gender Differences in Investments and Outcomes

We exploit exogenous variation in the risk of waterborne disease created by implementation of a major water reform in Mexico in 1991 to investigate impacts of infant exposure on indicators of cognitive development and academic achievement in late childhood. We estimate that a one standard deviation reduction in childhood diarrhea mortality rates results in about a 0.1 standard deviation increase in test scores, but only for girls. We show that a reason for the gender differentiated impacts is that the water reform induces parents to make complementary investments in education that favor girls, consistent with their comparative advantage in skilled occupations. The results provide novel evidence of the potential for clean water provision to narrow test score gaps across countries and, within countries, across gender

Magnetic and FMR study on CoFe₂O₄/ZnFe₂O₄ bilayers

CoFe<sub>2</sub>O<sub>4</sub>/ZnFe<sub>2</sub>O<sub>4</sub> bilayers were deposited by the pulsed laser deposition on amorphous fused quartz substrate at substrate temperature of 350°C and in oxygen pressure of 0.16 mbar. The films were studied after ex-situ annealing for 2 h in air at various temperatures up to 650°C. The magnetic properties of the bilayers were studied at 300 K and at 10 K. Ferromagnetic resonance was carried out at x-band frequencies at room temperature. It was found that as a result of annealing, the diffusion between Co ferrite and Zn ferrite starts around 350°C and leads to a large line width system having magnetization, which remains undetected by Ferromagnetic resonance