We use development accounting techniques to assess the contribution of health to differences in income per capita among countries. Rather than rely on regressions in aggregate data, we build up estimates of the effect of health starting from microeconomic data. We examine both a particular...

I use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on GDP per capita. I employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health, which I combine with cross-country and historical...

We present a model of growth and technology transfer based on the idea that technologies are specific to particular combinations of inputs. We argue that this model is more realistic that the usual specification in which an improvement in any technique for producing a given good improves all...

We examine the role of declining mortality in explaining the rise of retirement over the course of the 20th century. We construct a model in which individuals make labor/leisure choices over their lifetimes subject to uncertainty about their date of death. In an environment in which mortality is...

An analysis of the changes since 1960 in the share of Americans' resources that are annuitized, which has declined slightly for younger Americans but has risen dramatically for the elderly, with important implications for the national saving rate and income inequality.

Massimo Livi-Bacci has taken us on a fascinating tour of demographic history. What lessons for developments in the world today can we draw from the story he tells? I will distinguish between three types of lessons, which I call "economic lessons," "demographic lessons," and "cultural/political...

This paper addresses two issues. The first is whether demographic change was plausibly responsible for the run-up in stock prices over the last decade, and whether an attempt by the baby boom cohort to cash out of its investments in the period 2010-2030 might lead to an "asset meltdown". The...