We investigate age-specific mortality in Britain and the United States since 1950. Neither trends in income nor in income inequality provide plausible explanations. Britain and the US had different patterns of income growth but similar patterns of mortality decline. Patterns of income inequality...

PPP-based national accounts have become an important part of the database for macroeconomists, development economists, and economic historians. Frequently used global data come from the Penn World Table (PWT) and the World Bank's World Development Indicators; a substantial fraction of the world...

Purchasing power parity exchange rates, or PPPs, are price indexes that summarize prices in each country relative to a numeraire country, typically the United States. These numbers are used to compare living standards across countries, by academics in studies of economic growth, particularly...

We use data from the Gallup World Poll and from the Demographic and Health Surveys to investigate how subjective wellbeing (SWB) is affected by mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, including mortality from HIV/AIDS. The Gallup data provide direct evidence on Africans' own emotional and evaluative...

Poverty counts are counts of individuals in poverty but are calculated from household or family data on income or expenditure. The transition from one to the other requires assumptions about intrahousehold allocation, about differences in needs across different people, and about the extent of...

The extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years. Although there is better data than ever before, controversies are not resolved. A major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys, which is used to measure poverty, grows less rapidly than...

There is a widespread belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased global income inequality, reducing per capita incomes by more in poor countries than in rich. This supposition is reasonable but false. Rich countries have experienced more deaths per head than have poor countries; their...

We show that standard models of intertemporal choice, including the permanent income hypothesis, imply that for any given cohort of people born at the same time, inequality in both consumption and income will grow with age. At any given date, each individual's consumption depends on the integral...

I explore the connection between income inequality and health in both poor and rich countries. I discuss a range of mechanisms, including nonlinear income effects, credit restrictions, nutritional traps, public goods provision, and relative deprivation. I review the evidence on the effects of...

I present a model of mortality and income that integrates the 'gradient,' the negative relationship between income and mortality, with the Wilkinson hypothesis, that income inequality poses a risk to health. Individual health is negatively affected by relative deprivation within a reference...