The anticipation of bad future events reduces currently experienced happiness and it may through this channel elicit detrimental behavioral responses. We explore this idea in the context of endogenous health and aging. We integrate physiological aging into a life-cycle model, calibrate it with...

There is empirical evidence that households use residential houses as status goods. In particular, people are shown to compare their houses with those at the top of the distribution. In this paper, we introduce a residential housing sector and status concerns for housing into a neoclassical...

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Some...

A core mechanism of unified growth theory is that accelerating technological progress induces mass education and, through interaction with child quantity-quality substitution, a decline in fertility. Using unique new data for 21 OECD countries over the period 1750-2000, we test, for the first...

The fetal origins hypothesis suggests that health and nutrition shocks in utero are causally related to health deficits in old age. It has received considerable empirical support, both within epidemiology and economics but so far it has not been integrated into a life cycle theory of human aging...

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the 'latitude gradient'...

We present a multicountry theory of economic growth and R&D-driven technological progress in which countries are connected by a network of knowledge exchange. Technological progress in any country depends on the state of technology in the countries it exchanges knowledge with. The diffusion of...

In this paper I propose a time-consistent method of discounting hyperbolically and apply it to three canonical environmental problems: (i) optimal renewable resource use, (ii) the tragedy of the commons, and (iii) economic growth and pollution. I show that, irrespective of potentially high...

We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the offshoring and reshoring decisions of firms in the age of automation. Our theory suggests that increasing productivity in automation leads to a relocation of previously offshored production back to the home economy but without improving...

We investigate renewable resources when the harvesting agents face self-control problems. Individuals are conceptualized as dual selves. The rational long-run self plans for the infinite future while the affective short-run self desires to maximize instantaneous profits. Depending on the degree...