In this essay, I review Robert Fogel's The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 which is concerned with the past, present, and future of human health. Fogel's work places great emphasis on nutrition, not only for the history of health, but for explaining aspects of current health,...

Externalities play a central role in most theories of economic growth. We argue that international externalities, in particular, are essential for explaining a number of empirical regularities about growth and development. Foremost among these is that many countries appear to share a common long...

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...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa remain high, they have started to decline. According to UN projections, they will fall further in the coming decades such that by the mid-21st century the ratio of the...

Inevitable population aging and slower population growth will affect the economies of all nations in ways influenced by cultural values, institutional arrangements, and economic incentives. One outcome will be a tendency toward increased capital intensity, higher wages, and lower returns on...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. In so doing we introduce a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium framework in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for...

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...

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...

Over the last 50 years, there has been a remarkable convergence in the occupational distribution between white men, women, and blacks. We measure the macroeconomic consequences of this convergence through the prism of a Roy model of occupational choice in which women and blacks face frictions in...