This paper uses the data in the NBER/CPE pilot sample of genealogies to create a new time series on life expectation in the U.S. since 1720. After attaining remarkably high levels toward the end of the eighteenth century, life expectation as measured by e0(10) began a decline that lasted about...

This paper summarizes a collaborative project designed to create a public-use tape suitable for a prospective study of aging among a random sample of 39,616 men mustered into 331 companies of the Union Army. The aim of the project is to measure the effect of socioeconomics and biomedical factors...

The aim of this paper is to break open the stochastic component of a maj or political change and to show that what seems like the product of purely chance events is the particular conjunction of processes, each of which is definable in a systematic way, that provide collectively a favorable...

Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1993

I was born in New York City in 1926, four years after my parents and my brother migrated to the United States from the city of Odessa in Russia. Although they arrived in New York penniless, my parents scraped together enough savings to establish the first of several small businesses just after I...

Interview with Professor Robert W. Fogel at the 1st Meeting of Laureates in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany, September 1-4, 2004. Interviewer is freelance journalist Marika Griehsel.

This paper, divided into seven sections, considers the development of economic growth theory in light of the spectacular advances of the economies of China, India, and Southeast Asia. Section 1 reviews the debate over the sources of technological change and the measurement of total factor...

This article argues that the nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are facing a potential disaster: intergenerational conflicts between the large number of workers approaching retirement at an earlier age than ever before in history and the smaller number...

At the close of World War II, there were wide-ranging debates about the future of economic developments. Historical experience has since shown that these forecasts were uniformly too pessimistic. Expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation; this topic...