Search Results
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
Killer Debt: The Impact of Debt on Mortality
This study analyzes the effect of individual finances (specifically creditworthiness and severely delinquent debt) on mortality risk. A large (approximately 170,000 individuals) subsample of a quarterly panel data set of individual credit reports is utilized in an instrumental variables design. The possibility of the reverse causality of bad health causing debt and death is removed by instrumenting for individual finances post 2011 using the exposure to the housing crisis based on their 2005 residence. Worsening creditworthiness and increases in severely delinquent debt are found to lead to ...
Working Paper
Social Security Reform with Heterogeneous Mortality
Using a heterogeneous-agent, life-cycle model of Social Security claiming, labor supply and saving, we consider the implications of lifespan inequality for Social Security reform. Quantitative experiments show that welfare is maximized when baseline benefits are independent of lifetime earnings, the payroll tax cap is kept roughly unchanged, and claiming adjustments are reduced. Eliminating the earnings test and the income taxation of Social Security benefits provides additional gains. The Social Security system that would maximize welfare in a "2050 demographics" scenario, characterized by ...
Journal Article
Mortality and Economic Growth
Countries with higher economic growth had, on average, higher growth in their crude death rates.
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 becomes cheaper as more individuals use better technology. It also confers a dynamic externality by increasing the future number of individuals who use the 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 ...
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 in Western Europe. Unlike Malthusian theories based solely on income, ours is consistent with the observed disconnect ...
Has Better Nutrition Driven Down Mortality Rates?
One popular theory has attributed the decline in death rates to improved nutrition. But an analysis of caloric intake worldwide suggests that there isn’t a strong relationship.
Economic Development and the Evolution of Mortality
Since 1960, the gap in GDP per capita between rich and poor countries has remained wide. Yet the gap in death rates has practically vanished during that period.
Working Paper
Trade Liberalization and Mortality : Evidence from U.S. Counties
We investigate the impact of a large economic shock on mortality. We find that counties more exposed to a plausibly exogenous trade liberalization exhibit higher rates of suicide and related causes of death, concentrated among whites, especially white males. These trends are consistent with our finding that more-exposed counties experience relative declines in manufacturing employment, a sector in which whites and males are over-represented. We also examine other causes of death that might be related to labor market disruption and find both positive and negative relationships. More-exposed ...