Search Results
COVID-19 and the Importance of Testing
Using only the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases does not help us understand the scope of the pandemic.
Newsletter
Is College Still Worth the High Price? Weighing Costs and Benefits of Investing in Human Capital
Students have several options for life after high school. While college has been a popular choice, college enrollment for recent high school graduates has dropped, and some people are challenging the notion that college is the best route for the majority of students. This article examines whether college is still a good investment.
Conference Paper
The baby boom and baby bust: some macroeconomics for population economics
What caused the baby boom? And, can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years? The hypothesis is that: (i) The secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of having children. (ii) The baby boom is explained by an atypical burst of technological progress in the household sector that occurred in the middle of the last century. This lowered the cost of having children. A model is developed in an attempt to account, quantitatively, for both the baby boom and bust.
Working Paper
Technology adoption, mortality and population dynamics
We develop a quantitative theory of mortality trends and population dynamics. Our theory emphasizes individual choices on costly adoption of healthy technologies and diffusion of knowledge about infections as a key channel for reducing mortality. Our theory is consistent with three observations on mortality: (i) The cross-country correlation between levels of mortality and income is negative; (ii) mortality in poor countries has converged to that of rich countries despite no convergence in income; and (iii) economic growth is not a prerequisite for mortality to decline. We calibrate our model ...
Journal Article
Aging and Wealth Inequality in a Neoclassical Growth Model
In this article, the author uses a version of the neoclassical growth model with overlapping generations of individuals to investigate the effect of aging on wealth inequality. When an economy?s population becomes older?that is, when the proportion of individuals 65 years of age and older increases?two effects are at work: a direct effect from the changing age composition of the population and an indirect, equilibrium effect from the change in asset holdings by owner?s age. The main result is that wealth inequality in an aging population may decrease or increase depending on the cause of the ...
Journal Article
Mortality and Economic Growth
Countries with higher economic growth had, on average, higher growth in their crude death rates.
Working Paper
Gender Gap
We employ the Ben-Porath (1967) human capital model to study the evolution of the gender wage gap over the long run. We consider the effect of changing lifecycle profiles of female market hours. We find that the implied response in unobserved investment in human capital accumulation accounts for most of the long run gender wage gap dynamics. This finding is consistent with the labor economists’ view that changing selection on unobservables played a critical role in the gender wage gap dynamics. Our contribution is to make explicit and quantify the link between market hours and (unobserved) ...
Working Paper
Technology Adoption, Mortality, and Population Dynamics
We develop a quantitative theory of mortality trends and population dynamics. We emphasize diseases as causes of death and individuals' decisions to reduce their mortality by adopting, at some cost, a modern health-related technology. Adoption confers a dynamic externality: Adoption becomes cheaper as more individuals acquire the modern technology. Our model generates an S-shaped diffusion curve, whose shape dictates the pace of mortality reduction in each country. We use the model to explain the gradual decline of mortality in Western Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as the ...
The State of COVID-19 around the Eighth District
What have COVID-19 trends in cases and deaths looked like in the largest MSAs in the District?
Journal Article
Perspectives on U.S. Media Coverage of the COVID-19 Pandemic
How have the U.S. media covered the evolution of COVID-19? This article discusses a working paper about media negativity during the pandemic.