• Corpus ID: 17332863

How Positive Was the Positive Check ? Investment and Fertility in the Aftermath of the 1918 Influenza in India ∗

@inproceedings{Donaldson2014HowPW,
  title={How Positive Was the Positive Check ? Investment and Fertility in the Aftermath of the 1918 Influenza in India ∗},
  author={David Donaldson and Daniel Keniston},
  year={2014}
}

• D. Donaldson, Daniel Keniston
• Published 2014
• Economics

The 1918 influenza epidemic struck India when the subcontinent was mired in its long-term Malthusian equilibrium of low population growth and stable per-capita consumption. Its terrible death toll left survivors with additional agricultural land, which we show they rapidly put to agricultural use with no decrease in yields. Over the next decade this increased per-capita wealth was invested on both child quantity as well as quality as measured by the literacy rate. These results are in striking contrast with the predictions of many Malthusian or unified growth models, which hold that increases in wealth at or near the Malthusian equilibrium should be entirely allocated towards additional fertility. Indian households in 1918 seem to have cared both for child quantity and quality, much as in models of modern households. ∗We thank Sunny Lee, Andrew Mollerus, Fatima Aqeel, Ting Wang, and Naureen Rashid for excellent research assistance. We are very grateful to Prashant Bharadwaj, Latika Chaudhury, Arvinda Guntupalli, and Takashi Kurosaki for their generosity in sharing data.