This paper proposes a joint model of tobacco consumption and mortality over the life-cycle. The decision to smoke is a trade off between current utility derived from smoking and a mortality risk increasing with age. Thus, individuals with a shorter potential life expectancy have less incentive...

Many developing countries are plagued by persistent inequality in income distribution. While a growing body of economic-demographic literature emphasizes differential fertility channel, this paper investigates differential child mortality - differences in child mortality across income groups -...

Over the past two decades deaths from opioids and other drugs have grown to be a major U.S. population health problem, but the magnitude of the crisis varies across the U.S., and explanations for widespread geographic variation in the severity of the drug crisis are limited. An emerging debate...

Life expectancy for Blacks is about 8 year shorter than for Whites. A shorter life expectancy, in line with the theoretical prediction of a simple model, determines a much lower amount of savings and wealth accumulation and therefore a lower degree of insurance. This, in turn, contributes to...

The paper takes the Leibnitz Integral Rule (LIR) under variable integration limits and demonstrates how it can be applied to a business firm's dynamic problem of determining its optimum level of investment activity, when the longevity (life span) of the investment is itself a variable determined...

Life expectancy for Blacks is about 8 year shorter than for Whites. A shorter life expectancy, in line with the theoretical prediction of a simple model, determines a much lower amount of savings and wealth accumulation and therefore a lower degree of insurance. This, in turn, contributes to...

We document relevant racial differences in the degree consumption insurance against shocks: Blacks appear to be less insured. We probe these results by performing a double/debiased lasso estimation of the treatment effects of a health shock, and we find that such effects are both larger and more...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

Retirees face longevity risk, or the risk of living longer (or less long) than expected; market risk, or the risk of poor investment returns over the retirement horizon, and finally; failure risk, or the risk of running out of money before death. The authors examine the sensitivity of these three...