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How do the risks of living long and facing high medical expenses affect the elderly’s saving behavior?
This article shows that the elderly, especially those with high lifetime incomes, maintain large asset holdings to account for the possibility of their living a long time and facing high medical expenses.
Journal Article
Mortality Reductions: Fast for Poorer Nations, Slow for Richer Nations
The same increase in life expectancy took longer for a sample of today’s richer countries than it did for some of today’s poorer countries, but it also occurred earlier.
Working Paper
Explaining Educational Attainment across Countries and over Time
Consider the following facts. In 1950, the richest countries attained an average of 8 years of schooling whereas the poorest countries 1.3 years, a large 6-fold difference. By 2005, the difference in schooling declined to 2-fold because schooling increased faster in poor than in rich countries. What explains educational attainment differences across countries and their evolution over time? We consider an otherwise standard model of schooling featuring non- homothetic preferences and a labor supply margin to assess the quantitative contribution of productivity and life expectancy in explaining ...
Working Paper
Technology adoption, mortality, and population dynamics
We develop a quantitative theory of mortality and population dynamics, emphasizing individuals' decisions to reduce their mortality by adopting better health technology. Expanded use of this technology reduces the cost of adoption and confers a dynamic externality by increasing the future number of individuals who use the technology. Our model generates a diffusion curve whose shape dictates the pace of mortality reduction. The model explains historical trends in mortality rates and life expectancies at various ages and population dynamics in Western Europe. Unlike Malthusian theories based ...
Journal Article
Who’s Driving a Recent Decline in Life Expectancy?
Life expectancy in the U.S. and most other G-7 nations declined from 2019 to 2021. For the U.S., it was the biggest two-year drop since the early 1920s.
Working Paper
Technology Adoption, Mortality, and Population Dynamics
We develop a quantitative theory of mortality and population dynamics. We emphasize individuals' decisions to reduce their mortality by adopting better health technology. Adoption confers a dynamic externality: Adoption becomes cheaper as more individuals use better technology. Our model generates a diffusion curve, whose shape dictates the pace of mortality reduction. The model explains historical trends in mortality rates and life expectancies at various ages, and population dynamics in Western Europe. Unlike Malthusian theories based solely on income, ours is consistent with the observed ...
Working Paper
Technology Adoption, Mortality, and Population Dynamics
We develop a quantitative theory of mortality and population dynamics, emphasizing individuals' decisions to reduce their mortality by adopting better health technology. Expanded use of this technology reduces the cost of adoption and confers a dynamic externality by increasing the future number of individuals who use the technology. Our model generates a diffusion curve whose shape dictates the pace of mortality reduction. The model explains historical trends in mortality rates and life expectancies at various ages and population dynamics in Western Europe. Unlike Malthusian theories based ...
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Heterogeneity in expected longevities
We develop a new methodology to compute differences in the expected longevity of individuals who are in different socioeconomic groups at age 50. We deal with two main problems associated with the standard use of life expectancy: that people?s socioeconomic characteristics evolve over time and that there is a time trend that reduces mortality over time. Using HRS data for individuals from different cohorts, we estimate a hazard model for survival with time-varying stochastic endogenous covariates that yields the desired expected durations. We uncover an enormous amount of heterogeneity in ...
Journal Article
The Role of Infant Mortality in Closing the Life Expectancy Gap
The difference in life expectancy between rich and poor countries has narrowed since 1970, owing in large part to decreases in infant mortality.
Working Paper
Technology Adoption, Mortality, and Population Dynamics
We develop a quantitative theory of mortality and population dynamics. We emphasize individuals' decisions to reduce their mortality by adopting better health technology. Adoption confers a dynamic externality: Adoption becomes cheaper as more individuals use better technology. Our model generates a diffusion curve, whose shape dictates the pace of mortality reduction. The model explains historical trends in mortality rates and life expectancies at various ages, and population dynamics in Western Europe. Unlike Malthusian theories based solely on income, ours is consistent with the observed ...