This paper investigates the link between health care expenditures and GDP for a sample of 21 OECD countries using recent developed panel cointegration techniques. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis accounts for the fact that health care expenditures are not only determined by income....

Economically highly developed countries are mostly democratic. But does this association constitute a causal relationship according to which democracy is a determinant of economic development? Or is it, conversely, economic development that paves the way for democratization? This paper gives an...

This note investigates the effects of the education level, product market rigidities and employment protection legislation on growth. It exploits macro-panel data for OECD countries. For countries close to the technological frontier, education and rigidities are significantly related to TFP...

This paper argues that accounting for the dynamic interactions between endogenous changes in longevity, the education composition of the population, and the associated fertility differential is crucial for understanding the economic and the demographic transition. In the model, heterogeneous...

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask whether those individuals who start in the best economic position are those who experience the largest earnings gains or the...

This paper examines the impact of employment protection legislation on productivity in the OECD, using annual cross-country aggregate data on the degree of regulations and industry-level data on productivity from 1982 to 2003. We adopt a difference-in-differences framework, which exploits likely...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

While China shared many systemic, initial conditions with the transition economies of Central-East Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), it had a more agricultural economy and a more stable political-economic system than many CEE and CIS countries. Unlike most of the CEE...

This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China and India for the period 2012-2030. Our estimates are derived using WHO's EPIC model of economic growth, which focuses on the negative effects of NCDs on labor supply and capital accumulation. We...

Since World War II, mortality has declined in the developing world. This paper examines the effects of this mortality decline on demographic and economic growth by a family-optimization model, in which fertility is endogenous and wealth yields utility through its status. The decline in mortality...