The survival of the royals

Batinti, Alberto, Costa-Font, Joan ORCID: 0000-0001-7174-7919 and Shandar, Vasuprada (2025) The survival of the royals. KYKLOS. ISSN 0023-5962 (In Press)

Text (2025.07.15_Royals) - Accepted Version Pending embargo until 1 January 2100. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB)

Abstract

We study the effect of royalty status - historically rooted legal privilege enjoyed by hereditary monarchs - on human longevity, a proxy of individuals’ health capital. We disentangle royalty status that encompassed serving as heads of state, and hence subject to status-related stress, from other family members alongside their contemporary countrymen. We exploit a dataset containing relevant demographic data and specifically the lifespan (age at death) of European Royals and their families spanning the past three centuries (1669 to 2022) from the sixteen European countries, including information for 845 high-status nobility and relative monarchs which is compared to otherwise similar countrymen by adjusting for relevant confounders. We document robust evidence of a statistically significant gap in life expectancy between monarchs and other members of the royal family, as well as between monarchs and the general population of an average of 5.2 to 7.1 years longer than their contemporaneous countrymen.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Health Policy
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine H Social Sciences J Political Science H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
JEL classification:	I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I1 - Health > I18 - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health N - Economic History > N1 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Growth and Fluctuations > N13 - Europe: Pre-1913 P - Economic Systems > P0 - General > P00 - General
Date Deposited:	01 Aug 2025 08:54
Last Modified:	01 Aug 2025 09:12
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128983

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