Dean Baker and Adriane Fugh-Berman have published a critique of a study I performed in 2007, entitled Why has longevity increased more in some states than in others?" One of the conclusions I drew from that study was that medical innovation accounts for a substantial portion of recent increases...

Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, whereas substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations. The goal of this paper is to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on...

This research explores the persistent effect of the Neolithic Revolution on the evolution of life expectancy in the course of human history. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the onset of the Neolithic Revolution and the associated rise in infectious diseases triggered...

We study the impact of endogenous longevity on optimal tax progressivity and inequality in an overlapping generations model with skill heterogeneity. Higher tax progressivity decreases both the longevity gap and net income inequality, but at the expense of lower average lifetime and lower...

Economic evaluation of projects involving changes in mortality risk conventionally assumes that lives are statistical, i.e., that risks and policy-induced changes in risk are small and similar among a population. In reality, baseline mortality risks and policy-induced changes in risk often...

We show that ambiguity aversion increases the value of a statistical life as soon as the marginal utility of wealth is higher if alive than dead. The intuition is that ambiguity aversion has a similar effect as an increase in the perceived baseline mortality risk, and thus operates as the "dead...