In cities around the world, Covid-19 lockdowns have improved outdoor air quality, in some cases dramatically. Even if only temporary, these improvements could have longer-lasting effects on policy by making chronic air pollution more salient and boosting political pressure for change. To that...

The beginning rise in obesity prevalence rates in South Africa was first noticed already in the early 1990s. Since then, several articles have discussed how the nutrition transition has affected people’s body weights in the country. This article is the first one that uses longitudinal data...

In the expected-utility theory of the monetary value of a statistical life, the so-called "dead-anyway" effect discovered by Pratt and Zeckhauser (1996) asserts that an individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for small reductions in mortality risk increases with the initial level of risk. Their...

We study the role of health care within a continuous time economy of overlapping generations subject to endogenous mortality. The economy consists of two sectors: final goods production and a health care sector, selling medical services to individuals. Individuals demand health care with a view...

The post-2015 development includes level-end goals for both under-five and neonatal mortality to be obtained by 2030: no more than 25 and 12 deaths per 1,000 births, respectively. Recent accelerations in the rate of reduction in under-five mortality have been cited as a cause for optimism. In...

This essay estimates the causal effect of postponing retirement on a wide range of health outcomes using Swedish administrative data on cause-specific mortality, hospitalizations and drug prescriptions. Exogenous variation in retirement timing comes from a reform which raised the age at which...

The measurement of health inequalities usually involves either estimating the concentration of health outcomes using an income-based measure of status or applying conventional inequalitymeasurement tools to a health variable that is non-continuous or, in many cases, categorical. However, these...

In 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads, but not on their urban interstate roads, from 55 mph to 65 mph for the first time in over a decade. Since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours...

This paper investigates the potential of an infant intervention to improve life expectancy, contributing to emerging interest in the early life origins of chronic disease. We analyse a pioneering program trialled in Sweden in the 1930s, which provided information, support and monitoring of...

Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this paper we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart...