Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) present evidence that improvements in population health do not promote economic growth. We … show that their result depends critically on the assumption that initial health has no causal effect on subsequent economic … growth. We argue that such an effect is likely, primarily because childhood health affects adult productivity. In our …

Micro-based and macro-based approaches have been used to assess the effects of health on economic growth. Micro …-based approaches aggregate the return on individual health from Mincerian wage regressions to derive the macroeconomic effects of … population health. Macro-based approaches estimate a generalized aggregate production function that decomposes output into its …

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the effects of health on economic growth. The micro … economic return on health. We reconcile these two strands of literature by showing that the point estimate of the macroeconomic … effect of health is quantitatively close to that found by aggregating the microeconomic effects, when carefully specifying …

experience and health. Our main result is that good health has a positive, sizable, and statistically significant effect on …