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...

The COVID crisis has severely hit both the United States and the European Union. Even though they are the wealthiest regions in the world, they differ substantially in economic performance, demographic characteristics, type of government, health systems, and measures undertaken to counteract...

This paper estimates the extent to which childhood circumstances contribute to health inequality in old age and evaluates the importance of major domains of childhood circumstances to health inequalities in the USA and China. We link two waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal...

We estimate calories available to workers' households in the USA, Belgium, Britain, France and Germany in 1890/1. We employ data from the United States Commissioner of Labor survey (see Haines, 1979) of workers in key export industries. We estimate that households in the USA, on average, had...

This paper proposes a test for the existence and the degree of contagious presenteeism and negative externalities in sickness insurance schemes. First, we theoretically decompose moral hazard into shirking and contagious presenteeism behavior. Then we derive testable conditions for reduced...

We study inequality in the distribution of self-assessed health (SAH) in the United States and China, two large countries that have expanded their insurance provisions in recent decades, but that lack universal coverage and differ in other social determinants of health. Using comparable health...

This paper uses Indian EUS-NSSO data on 32 states/union territories and 570 districts for a bi-annual panel with 5 waves to estimate how regional population reacts to asymmetric shocks. These shocks are measured by non-employment rates, unemployment rates, and wages in fixed-effects regressions...