In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longer than most of their Western European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy had fallen behind that of most Western European countries. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily due to real declines in the...

This paper attempts to quantify the social, private, and public-finance values of reducing obesity through pharmaceutical and medical interventions. We find that the total social value of bariatric surgery is large for treated patients, with incremental social cost-effectiveness ratios typically...

The public economic burden of shifting trends in population health remains uncertain. Sustained increases in obesity, diabetes, and other diseases could reduce life expectancy - with a concomitant decrease in the public-sector's annuity burden - but these savings may be offset by worsening...

In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longer than their European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy at that age has diverged substantially compared to Europe. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily the symptom of real declines in the health of...

A popular policy option for addressing the growth in weight has has been the imposition of a "fat tax" on selected foods that are deemed to promote obesity. Understanding the public economics of "fat taxes" requires an understanding of how or even whether individuals respond to changes in food...

A frontier approach is utilised to estimate a matching function (reparameterised as a Beveridge curve) on data for the main Italian territorial areas (North, Centre, South) throughout the 1990s. The Southern labour market proves to be much less efficient than that in the rest of the country,...

The paper investigates the international GDP synchronization within the international real business cycle framework (Backus, Kehoe and Kydland, 1992). It sheds new light on the comovement issue by highlighting the role of cross-country divergence in labor market institutions (LMIs). We first...