Education and income are strong predictors of health and longevity. In the last 20 years many efforts have been made to understand if these relationships are causal and what the possible role of policy should be as a result. The evidence from various studies is ambiguous: the effects of...

In 1971 President Nixon declared war on cancer and increased the federal funds allocated to cancer research dramatically. Thirty years later, many have declared this war a failure. Overall cancer statistics confirm this view: age-adjusted mortality in 2000 was essentially unchanged from the...

We propose a dynamic production function of population health and mortality from birth onwards. Our parsimonious model provides an excellent fit for the mortality and survival curves for both primate and human populations since 1816. The model sheds light on the dynamics behind many phenomena...