Our objective is to investigate, how the combination of habit formation with endogenous capital utilization decisions affects the process of economic growth. We find that in the presence of positive productivity growth, habit formation in consumption reduces the rate of capital utilization while...

The apparently unrelenting growth in the GDP-share of health spending (SHS) has been a perennial issue of policy concern. Does an equilibrium limit exist? The issue has been left open in recent dynamic models which take income growth and population aging as given. We view these variables as...

The apparently unrelenting growth in the GDP-share of health spending (SHS) has been a perennial issue of policy concern. Does an equilibrium limit exist? The issue has been left open in recent dynamic models which take income growth and population aging as given. We view these variables as...

The problem of the uninsured - those eschewing the purchase of health insurance policies - cannot be fully understood without considering informal alternatives to market insurance called "self-insurance" and "self-protection", including the publicly and charitably-financed safety-net health care...

While few economists analyzed criminal behaviour and the criminal justice process before Gary Becker’s seminal 1968 paper, an enormous body of economic research on crime has since been produced. This insightful and comprehensive Handbook reviews and extends much of this important...

Existing forecasts of a continuously rising income share of health spending (SHS) take per capita income growth and population aging as given. We develop a human capital-based endogenous growth model treating these variables as endogenously determined. In this private-economy setting, SHS has...

We specify a demand function for longevity, or quantity of life, along with corresponding demand functions for indicators of quality of life and a value-of-health and life extension functions. We show that the demand for health must be derived in conjunction with that for longevity and the...

The worldwide problem with pay-as-you-go, defined-benefits social security systems isn't just financial. Through a dynamic, overlapping-generations model where forming a family and bearing and educating children are choice variables, we show that social security taxes and benefits generate...