We provide a new explanation for sub-Saharan Africa’s slow demographic and economic change. In a model where children die from infectious disease, childhood health affects human capital and noninfectious-disease related adult mortality. When child mortality falls from lower prevalence, as in...

We study the dynamics of poverty and health in a model of endogenous growth and rational health behavior. Population health depends on the prevalence of infectious diseases that can be avoided through costly prevention. The incentive to do so comes from the negative effects of ill health on the...

Three profound changes - the mortality, fertility and contraception transitions - characterized the Victorian era in England. Economists, following Becker (1960), focus on the first two and underplay the third by assuming couples can achieve their fertility target at no cost. The historical...

We study the dynamics of poverty and health in a model of endogenous growth and rational health behavior. Population health depends on the prevalence of infectious diseases that can be avoided through costly prevention. The incentive to do so comes from the negative effects of ill health on the...

We study the cultural process through which a society inculcates an entrepreneurial spirit. People work for a guaranteed wage or operate a firm whose return depends on business expertise. The latter is culturally acquired, within the family or outside, and people may choose an occupation...

The link between the mortality and epidemiological transitions is used to identify the effect of the former on the fertility transition: a mortality transition that is not accompanied by improving morbidity causes slower demographic and economic change. In a model where children may die from...

How does inequality motivate people and at what cost? We develop a model of perpetual youth with heterogeneous upward-looking aspirations -- people value their consumption relative to the conditional mean of those above them in the distribution. Their survival depends on health capital produced...