‘What is the Case Fatality Rate of Smallpox?’, with Romola Davenport, Population Studies, forthcoming (open access).
Using 18th-century Swedish and Icelandic data, shows smallpox's case fatality rate depended on social context. The CFR was around 8–10% when the disease was endemic among children in Sweden, but 40–55% in Iceland where it hit a population where adults were also susceptible.
‘Born in Smog: Immediate and Persistent Health Consequences of Acute Air Pollution Exposure in Historical London, 1892–1919’, Explorations in Economic History, 101 (2026), article number 101773 (open access).
Using daily fog presence as a proxy for acute air pollution in London, 1892–1919, I find being born on a fog day persistently raised mortality and morbidity from respiratory disease, measles, and influenza later in childhood, though it had little effect on birth outcomes or child growth.
‘The Decline of Child Stunting in 122 Countries: A Systematic Review of Child Growth Studies since the Nineteenth Century’, with Juliana Jaramillo-Echeverri and 41 other co-authors, BMJ Global Health, 11, no. 2 (2026), article number e018607 (open access). Web Appendix.
A systematic review of historical growth data in 122 countries finds stunting was once as widespread in today's wealthy countries as in low-income countries today, and its long-run decline was central to the health transition.
'Maternal Influenza-Like Illness and Neonatal Health During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in a Swiss City', with Mathilde le Vu (lead author), Katharina L Matthes, Aline Moerlen, Irene Hoesli, David Baud and Kaspar Staub, Annals of Internal Medicine, 178, no. 11 (2025), pp. 1632-1641.
Using Swiss birth records, we find mothers infected during the 1918 flu pandemic, especially in the third trimester, had babies with lower birth weight and higher preterm birth rates.
'The Determinants of Child Stunting and Shifts in the Growth Pattern of Children: A Long-Run, Global Review', Journal of Economic Surveys, 39, no. 2 (2025), pp. 405-452 (open access).
Reviews 150 years of change in child growth patterns and compares historical high-income-country research with today's low- and middle-income-country literature, using the puzzle of India's unusually high stunting rate as a throughline.
'Did Smallpox Cause Stillbirths? Maternal Smallpox Infection, Vaccination and Stillbirths in Sweden, 1780-1839', with Sören Edvinsson and Kota Ogasawara, Population Studies, 78, no. 3 (2024), pp. 467-482 (open access).
Swedish parish data show smallpox was not a major cause of stillbirths before 1820, since most women had smallpox as children, though a small effect appears after 1820 when waning immunity from vaccination left more adults susceptible to smallpox.
‘The Effect of Nutritional Status on Historical Infectious Disease Morbidity: Evidence from the London Foundling Hospital, 1892-1919’, History of the Family, 28, no. 2 (2023), pp. 198-228 (open access).
Using Foundling Hospital records where environment was effectively randomized by fostering, I find nutritional status didn't affect whether children caught five common diseases, but did affect how long they stayed sick with measles and mumps.
'Health Shocks, Recovery and the First Thousand Days: The Effect of the Second World War on Height Growth in Japanese Children', with Kota Ogasawara and Tim J. Cole, Population and Development Review, 27, no. 4 (2021), pp. 1075-1105 (open access read-only).
Japanese height data show that children exposed to the health shocks of WWII in late childhood/adolescence did not recover but not those exposed in infancy were able to recover, challenging the 'first thousand days' consensus that child stunting is irreversible.
‘Infant Feeding and Post-Weaning Health: Evidence from Turn-of-the-Century London’, with Vellore Arthi, Economics and Human Biology, 43 (2021), article number 101065 (open access accepted version).
Foundling Hospital data show breastfed infants had lower mortality and better weight gain, even after weaning, but these advantages faded by mid-childhood.
'The Growth Pattern of British Children, 1850-1975', with Pei Gao, Economic History Review, 74, no. 2 (2021), pp. 341-371 (open access).
Training-ship records document steady height gains for British boys from the 1850s–1970s (fastest in the interwar period), with a pronounced adolescent growth spurt only emerging for boys born from the 1910s onward.
'Collider Bias in Economic History Research', Explorations in Economic History, 78 (2020), article number 101356 (open access accepted version).
Introduces the concept of collider bias to economic history research via ten examples, showing that even quasi-random research designs rarely escape it.
'Sample-Selection Biases and the Historical Growth Pattern of Children', Social Science History, 44, no. 3 (2020), pp. 417-444 (open access read-only).
Extends debates over selection bias in historical height data to show specifically how the age pattern of child growth can be distorted with a variety of examples.
'Nutrition, Crowding and Disease among Low-income Households in Tokyo in 1930’, with Kota Ogasawara and Ian Gazeley, Australian Economic History Review, 60, no. 1 (2020), pp. 73-104.
A 1930 Tokyo household survey finds calorie intake was adequate overall, and income/crowding, not nutrition, predicted illness among poor families.
Sir Timothy Coghlan Prize winning article
'Childlessness, Celibacy and Net Fertility in Pre-Industrial England: The Middle-class Evolutionary Advantage', with David de la Croix and Jacob Weisdorf, Journal of Economic Growth, 24, no. 3 (2019), pp. 223-256 (open access read-only).
Accounting for singleness and childlessness, we find the pre-industrial English middle class had the highest reproductive success of any social group. This advantage partially explains the accumulation of human capital in pre-Industrial England.
Previously circulated as '“Decessit sine prole”: Childlessness, Celibacy, and Survival of the Richest’
'Disease and Child Growth in Industrialising Japan: Critical Windows and the Growth Pattern, 1917-1939', with Kota Ogasawara, Explorations in Economic History, 69, no. 1 (2018), pp. 64-80 (open access).
Interwar prefecture-level Japanese child height data show the disease environment at older ages shaped children's growth pattern more than disease exposure in infancy.
'Getting Under the Skin: Children's Health Disparities as Embodiment of Social Class', with Michael R. Kramer, Jennifer B. Kane, Claire Margerison-Zilko, Jessica Jones-Smith, Katherine King, Pamela Davis-Kean and Joseph G. Grzywacz, Population Research and Policy Review, 36, no. 5 (2017), pp. 671–697 (open access accepted version).
Proposes a framework linking three dimensions of social class, resource allocation, group identity, and conflict, to how class becomes embodied in children's health.
'Fetal Health Stagnation: Have Health Conditions in Utero Improved in the United States and Western and Northern Europe over the past 150 years?', Social Science & Medicine, 179 (2017), pp. 18-26 (open access accepted version).
Argues that, unlike most health indicators, birth weight has been essentially flat in the US/Western Europe since the late 1800s.
'Children's Growth in an Adaptive Framework: Explaining the Growth Patterns of American Slaves and Other Historical Populations', Economic History Review, 70, no. 1 (2017), pp. 3-29 (open access accepted version).
Proposes an evolutionary framework of prenatal/postnatal adaptive responses to explain puzzles like enslaved American children's dramatic catch-up growth.
'Health, Gender and the Household: Children's Growth in the Marcella Street Home, Boston, MA and the Ashford School, London, UK', Research in Economic History, 30 (2016), pp. 277-361 (open access accepted version).
Longitudinal data from a Boston orphanage and a London school at the turn of the twentieth century find no substantial gender gap in children's catch-up growth.
Technical note on applying the WHO growth standard/reference to historical data available here.
'Optimal fetal growth - a misconception?', with Mark Hanson, Torvid Kiserud, Gerard H.A. Visser and Peter Brocklehurst, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 213, no. 3 (2015), pp. 332-34.
Argues against a single universal 'optimal' fetal growth standard, since birth-weight variation reflects normal adaptive responses rather than pathology.
Watch a video of Mark Hanson and I discussing this paper and its implications here.
'Una de Cal y Otra de Arena: Building Comparable Real Wages in a Global Perspective', with Robert C. Allen and Tommy E. Murphy, Revista de Historia Económica, 33, no. 1 (2015), pp. 61-75.
Defends the authors' earlier use of 'welfare ratios' over commodity wages against a critique, maintaining that early North America–Latin America divergence is robust.
'Prices and Production: Agricultural Supply Response in Fourteenth Century England', The Economic History Review, 67, no. 1 (2014), pp. 66-91 (open access accepted version).
Fourteenth-century manorial records show medieval farm managers responded only weakly to grain prices, challenging claims of high medieval commercialization.
T. S. Ashton Prize winning article
'Inescapable Hunger?: Energy Cost Accounting and the Costs of Digestion, Pregnancy and Lactation', The European Review of Economic History, 17, no. 3 (2013), pp. 340-363.
Factoring in digestion, pregnancy, and lactation costs shows per-capita calorie availability in 18th–19th century England was lower than earlier estimates, especially before 1900. Digestion costs were potentially large while the costs of pregnancy and lactions were relatively low.
'Real Wages and the Family: Adjusting Real Wages to Changing Demography in Pre-Modern England', Explorations in Economic History, 50, no. 1 (2013), pp. 99-115.
Combining wage and demographic data shows family welfare typically fell steadily as children were born, recovering only once they left home. However, adjusting welfare ratios for changing family size does not affect Allen's trends in English real wages.
'The Colonial Origins of Divergence in the Americas: A Labour Market Approach', with Robert C. Allen and Tommy E. Murphy, The Journal of Economic History, 72, no. 4 (2012), pp. 863-894.
Real wage comparisons show North America was already about twice as prosperous as Latin America from the earliest observations in the colonial period. We argue that wages were set largely by conditions in the colonizing country.
‘Stunting: Past, Present, Future’, Policy Brief and Conference Report (2018).
‘Beyond Birth Weight: Measuring Early Life Health Conditions Past, Present and Future’, with Mark Hanson, Conference Report (2015).
Book review of Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, in The Economic History Review, 76, no. 3 (2023), pp. 979-81. (open access read-only).
Dissertation summary, Journal of Economic History, 75, no. 2 (2015), pp. 558-62.
'Review of periodical literature on continental Europe from 1700 published in 2013', with Matthias Morys, Markus Lampe and Kerstin Enflo, The Economic History Review (2015), pp. E1-E45.
My contribution covered the topics of living standards and demography.
Book review of Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700, in Continuity and Change, 28, no. 2 (2013), pp. 318-20.
'Evaluating the Effectiveness of Yield-Raising Strategies in Medieval England: An Econometric Approach', University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, no. 90 (2011).
Book review of Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain in Technology and Culture, 52 (2011), pp. 195-6.