This note estimates the causal effect of life expectancy on per capita income and tests the hypothesis of a non-monotonic effect using finite mixture models. The results confirm the hypothesis and qualify recent evidence for a negative effect by Acemoglu and Johnson (2007).

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the hypothesis that population shocks such as the repeated outbreaks of the plague affected the timing of the demographic transition. The empirical analysis uses disaggregate data from Germany and exploits geographic variation in the exposure to...

This paper takes a global, long-run perspective on the recent debate about secular stagnation, which has so far mainly focused on the short term. The analysis is motivated by observing the interplay between the economic and demographic transition that has occurred in the developed world over the...