We study whether a democracy improves a measure of individual wellbeing; human heights. Drawing on individual-level datasets, we test the hypothesis using a battery of eight different measures of democracy and derived averages, and include models accounting for several confounders, regional and...

In this paper we present a theory of health investment when there are multiple causes of death. Since there are several risks competing for one's life, the health investments in avoiding different causes of death are not independent in general. We analyze the optimal investment rules and the...

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy...