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...

HIV/AIDS was the main cause of death among young adults in the 1990s. The sexual freedom from the rise of contraceptives and women's empowerment affected individuals' preferences for dating, marriage and fertility. In this paper, we investigate whether the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the 1980s...

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 insurance companies, as equity stakeholders in policyholders' lives, have incentives to mitigate their health risks. I introduce a framework that enables life insurers to evaluate the financial viability of developing and implementing health engagement programs. By leveraging a proprietary...

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...

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...

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...