This paper examines the determinants of infant mortality rates in a cross section of countries using a "growth regression" approach. The paper argues that infant mortality is a valid measure of living standards, worthy of study in its own right. It also shows that first order differential...

We use a panel of 139 countries to examine the relationship between a country's openness to international trade and several health outcomes and find that, in general, increased openness is associated with lower rates of infant mortality and higher average life expectancies, especially in...

Early evidence on the pandemic’s effects pointed to women’s employment falling disproportionately, leading observers to call a “she-cession.” This paper documents the extent and persistence of this phenomenon in a quarterly sample of 38 advanced and emerging market economies. We show...

In recent years, the international community has been increasing its efforts to reduce the human footprint on air pollution and global warming. Total CO2 emissions are a key component of global emissions, and as such, they are closely monitored by national and supranational entities. This study...

At present, academic actuarial research involving the mortality modeling of multiple populations mainly focuses on factor-based approaches. This comes with little attention to interpretable models of mortality that take patterns across space into consideration. To address this, we propose a...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for 17 million births in 72 countries, we...

This paper proposes a structural econometric approach to estimating the basic reproduction number (R0) of Covid-19. This approach identifies R0 in a panel regression model by filtering out the effects of mitigating factors on disease diffusion and is easy to implement. We apply the method to...

This paper surveys the current state of global empirical research on price setting behaviour at the firm level to evaluate the adequacy of pricing models used in the macro literature. To that end, it analyses the implications of 25 theoretical models (sticky information, menu costs, time...

We propose a unified growth theory to investigate the mechanics generating the economic and demographic transition, and the role of mortality differences for comparative development. The framework can replicate the quantitative patterns in historical time series data and in contemporaneous...