糖心原创

Title:  Build Better Health: Evidence from Ireland on Housing Quality and Mortality

Abstract

Poor housing is one of the world's most widespread health exposures, but because housing quality rarely moves independently of income and place, direct causal evidence on the health returns to improving it is scarce. We study a rare exception: the construction of almost 50,000 subsidised, standardised cottages for agricultural labourers in rural Ireland, 1883--1919. Using a new panel of annual district-level deaths by cause, age and sex, we find that cottage building reduced all-cause mortality by around 0.7 deaths per thousand, 4.3 percent of the baseline rate. The effect runs through communicable respiratory disease, and not through waterborne disease, animal-borne disease or crowding-sensitive infections - evidence that the gains came from the indoor atmospheric environment rather than sanitation or space. The scheme was highly cost-effective.

There is a slightly older draft of the paper available here: