Extreme heat is increasing in frequency and intensity, with disproportionate risks for clinically and socially vulnerable groups. This paper identifies the relationship between acute heat and mortality in Aotearoa New Zealand. To estimate same-day heat-mortality associations, we link...

This paper examines the relationship between union membership and deaths of despair. Using state-level variation in the timing of the adoption of right-to-work (RTW) laws as a natural experiment, I show that right-to-work laws are associated with a decline in union membership and an increase in...

Prior studies assessing welfare across countries have utilised measures that combine country-level outcomes in income and life expectancy. However, this perspective remains blind to the fact that two countries may have the same life expectancy and/or average income but very different underlying...

This study explores the determinants of business survival in Spain's tropical and subtropical fruit sector from 2006 to 2021. Using data from the Iberian Financial Statements Analysis System, and applying survival analysis techniques including Cox regression, we assess the effects of factors...

Emergency departments are a primary point of contact between older adults and the healthcare system, yet standard emergency care is poorly adapted to the complex needs of geriatric patients. Geriatric Emergency Departments (GEDs) - accredited units that integrate geriatric-trained staff,...

Lebanon does not have a national mortality table that reflects its demographic and health conditions. Despite ongoing changes in mortality patterns driven by economic crises, political instability, and social changes, outdated foreign tables such as AM80 remain in use in the insurance and public...

Guaranteed annuity options (GAOs) allow policyholders to convert accumulated funds into life annuities at maturity at a guaranteed minimum rate. Thus, insurers are exposed to both investment and longevity risks. Accurate valuation of these long-term, survival-contingent contracts is essential...

In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of social security income on mental health. We focus on widowhood, a life event associated with large and persistent mental health declines, and exploit a reform of the Dutch survivor benefits system that introduced cohort-based restrictions in...

We study how health insurance deductibles affect healthcare spending and health using a regression discontinuity design and administrative data from the Netherlands. Exploiting an annual deductible reset, we compare patients admitted to the emergency room just before and after January 1....

This paper characterizes optimal education and population policies within a continuous-time overlapping generations (OLG) framework where fertility, schooling duration, and health expenditures are endogenous. In this model, mortality risk is driven by a negative congestion effect from population...

Abstract We study life expectancy inequality in a Mirrleesian life-cycle framework. Life expectancy shapes the efficiency dimension of redistribution via the pension wedge. Moreover, cost- and preference-based channels arising from the income-lifespan gradient reduce the mechanical value of...

Healthcare systems worldwide face increasing nurse shortages, but the consequences remain poorly understood. This paper studies how nurse scarcity in hospitals affects care provision and patient health. I exploit the 2011 Swiss franc stabilization, which increased the salience to cross-border...

Urban heat is an increasingly important public health risk, yet empirical evidence on its health and economic impacts remains limited, particularly for rapidly growing tropical megacities. This study aims to provide an operational basis for urban planning and investment decisions by quantifying...

Emergency departments are a primary point of contact between older adults and the healthcare system, yet standard emergency care is poorly adapted to the complex needs of geriatric patients. Geriatric Emergency Departments (GEDs) - accredited units that integrate geriatric-trained staff,...

The geography of the U.S. opioid epidemic has shifted repeatedly across epidemic waves. After a period in which overdose mortality increasingly burdened rural and suburban communities, the fentanyl era appears to have redirected the crisis toward dense urban cores. Here, we document a post-2015...

After implementing mitigation measures on road projects, it is critical to assess whether they effectively address the targeted impacts-namely, restrict wildlife movement and mortality from wildlife-vehicle collisions. In this study, we used a control-impact design to answer two key questions:...

Demographic change has profoundly influenced economic and societal developments in industrialised nations, driven by declining fertility, rising life expectancy, and migration dynamics. While national trends are well-documented, regional demographic variations remain underexplored, particularly...

While most studies on COVID-19 in India have centred on infection rates, this study shifts the lens towards mortality by examining the spatial disparities and determinants of the COVID-19 case fatality ratio (CFR), a critical yet underexplored indicator of disease severity with economic...

We study the long-run health effects of illegal toxic waste disposal conducted by organized crime in Italy. We exploit quasi-random variation in historical wind direction around contaminated sites combined with a difference-in-differences design. Using administrative data on cancer deaths...

This study extends existing mortality prediction frameworks by incorporating information borrowed from population-gender-age subgroups that exhibit similar mortality patterns. The borrowed information is integrated into classical mortality models to improve the accuracy of future mortality rate...

Despite stagnant economic and living conditions, early 20th-century colonial Jamaica experienced a remarkable increase in life expectancy — a phenomenon referred to as the Jamaica Paradox. One factor believed to be key in this transformation was the Hookworm Campaign (1919-1936), an...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a prodigious corpus of human writing and may reveal human preferences over characteristics of life courses, such as income, longevity, and working conditions. We present OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and a broadly representative sample of Americans with pairs of...

One of the topical global challenges that jeopardises achieving sustainable future is the increasing carbon emission from many developing countries due to poor environmental regulations, resources shortages and inadequate clean technology to derive an energy transition process, which reduces...

This paper explores the relationship between geographic mortality differentials and human capital investment patterns in the Malthusian setup of 19th-century Armenia. We examine how variations in altitude correlate with mortality rates, human capital accumulation, and fertility decisions. Using...

Being indebted represents significant risks associated with global financial instability in a world where financial stability hangs precariously between debt and economic growth. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) casts a critical eye over countries navigating the perilous seas of fiscal...

The growing ageing of the population in developed economies has necessitated the progressive use of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the home care of elderly individuals. The effect of these technologies on elderly health outcomes remains an open issue. In this...

Background During the last decades, there has been a great interest on the link between macroeconomic conditions and health. More precisely, many studies had studied as health outcome cardiovascular disease mortality, focusing in different countries, determinants, and using numerous econometric...

Introduction The annual increase in emergency department (ED) visits in Taiwan has led to overcrowding in major hospitals and extended patient stays in the ED. International studies suggest that prolonged ED stays may influence healthcare costs and clinical outcomes for hospitalized patients....

Objective To estimate the effect of economic recessions on health inequality, with a focus on identifying recessions that have a health component. Methods This retrospective observational study uses the interannual rate of change in gross domestic product (GDP) as an indicator of economic...

We estimate doctor value-added (VA) combining population-wide patient-doctor register data with exogenous variation in the assignment of patients to GPs. We find substantial variation in the quality of GPs as measured by patients' post-assignment mortality. Certain doctor characteristics and...

This paper examines the impact of robotisation on workplace safety in EU manufacturing sectors between 2011 and 2019. To address endogeneity concerns, we employ an instrumental variable approach and find that robot adoption reduces both injuries and fatalities. Specifically, a 10% increase in...

We investigate how occupation influences the relationship between temperature and mortality in Mexico. Using multiple decades of nationwide death records - which include information on occupation - linked to local weather data, we find that heat-related mortality risk varies sharply by...