The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth distorts important behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency ratios. Two alternative measures of age are explored: mortality risk and remaining life expectancy. With these alternative measures, the huge wave...

We propose a simple summary statistic for a nation’s flow of welfare, measured as a consumption equivalent, and compute its level and growth rate for a broad set of countries. This welfare metric combines data on consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality. Although it is highly correlated...

When Social Security was instituted in 1935, the period life expectancy at age 20 for males was 66 and for females 69. Today, 20-year-old males have a period life expectancy of 76 and females, 80. This increase in life expectancy has been accompanied by a corresponding improvement in health at...