The consequences of successful public health interventions for social violence and conflict are largely unknown. This paper closes this gap by evaluating the effect of a major health intervention - the successful expansion of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic - in...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

We present a theory of the economic and demographic transition where adult longevity, child mortality, fertility and the education composition of the population are jointly determined. The model allows for an investigation of the determinants of underdevelopment traps as well as of the mechanism...

This paper studies the relationship between patience and comparative development through a combination of reduced-form analyses and model estimations. Based on a globally representative dataset on time preference in 76 countries, we document two sets of stylized facts. First, patience is...

This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. Individuals make optimal decisions about fertility, education of their children and the type and intensity of the investments in their own education. These decisions are affected by different dimensions of mortality...

This paper presents a microfounded theory of long-term development. We model the interplay between economic variables, namely the process of human capital formation and technological progress, and the biological constraint of finite lifetime expectancy. All these processes affect each other and...

This paper studies the relationship between patience and comparative development through a combination of reduced-form analyses and model estimations. Based on a globally representative dataset on time preference in 76 countries, we document two sets of stylized facts. First, patience is...

Why does patience vary across individuals and countries? We provide evidence on a widely-hypothesized mechanism, namely that higher longevity fosters patience. Using data on patience for 80,000 individuals in 76 countries, this paper relates exogenous variation in longevity across...

This paper studies the endogenous emergence of political regimes in societies in which productive resources are distributed unequally and institutions do not ensure political commitments. The results imply that for any level of development there exists a distribution of resources such that...

This paper takes a global, long-run perspective on the recent debate about secular stagnation, which has so far mainly focused on the short term. The analysis is motivated by observing the interplay between the economic and demographic transition that has occurred in the developed world over the...