According to the "healthy immigrant effect" (HIE), immigrants upon arrival are healthier than locally born residents. However, this health advantage is supposed to diminish or even disappear over a relatively short period and the immigrants' health status is converging to that of the natives....

Throughout adulthood and old age, levels of well-being appear to remain relatively stable. In this chapter, we argue that focusing on a phase of life during which this positive picture does not necessarily prevail promises to help us better understand between-person disparities in the...

The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the importance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

One explanation for the increasing prevalence of stunting in South Africa over the past 15 years while other development indicators have improved is that Big Food retail chains have been contributing to a low quality diet across the country, particularly in poor urban households. We thus use...

We propose a dynamic production function of population health and mortality from birth onwards. Our parsimonious model provides an excellent fit for the mortality and survival curves for both primate and human populations since 1816. The model sheds light on the dynamics behind many phenomena...

A rich literature documents the benefits of social safety net programs for children. This paper focuses on an unexplored margin: how children's programs impact parents' well-being. We explore changes in children's public health insurance and its effects on parents' economic and behavioral...

We examine whether and how the educational background of political leaders matters for policy choices and outcomes. Using data on municipalities in Brazil from 2000-2008, we estimate the effects of electing a more educated leader in a regression-discontinuity design whereby policy inputs and...

The development of health indicators to measure healthy life expectancy (HLE) is an active field of research aimed at summarizing the health of a population. Although many health indicators have emerged in the literature as critical metrics in public health assessments, the methods and data to...

Exploiting the fact that hypertension is diagnosed when a person's blood pressure reading exceeds a medically specified threshold (90 mmHg for diastolic blood pressure or 140 mmHg for systolic blood pressure), this study estimates the effect of a first-ever hypertension diagnosis on Chinese...