We show that the long-run economic growth effect of an increase in the retirement age is unambiguously positive in research and development based endogenous growth models. This contrasts recent findings based on models of learning-by-doing-spillovers, in which an increase in the retirement age...

We study the role of health care within a continuous time economy of overlapping generations subject to endogenous mortality. The economy consists of two sectors: final goods production and a health care sector, selling medical services to individuals. Individuals demand health care with a view...

We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa remain high, they have started to decline. According to United Nations projections, they will fall further in the coming decades such that by the mid-21st century the ratio of...

We propose a novel framework to analyse the macroeconomic impact of noncommunicable diseases. We incorporate measures of disease prevalence into a human capital augmented production function, which enables us to determine the economic costs of chronic health conditions in terms of foregone gross...

The positive cross-country correlation between health and economic growth is well-established, but the underlying mechanisms are complex and difficult to discern. Three issues are of central concern. First, assessing and disentangling causality between health and economic growth is empirically...

The paper presents a transformation of a multi-stage optimal control model with random switching time to an age-structured optimal control model. Following the mathematical transformation, the advantages of the present approach, as compared to a standard backward approach, are discussed. They...

We study the impact of health insurance expansion in the US on health expenditure, longevity growth and welfare in an overlapping generations economy in which individuals purchase health care to lower mortality. We consider three sectors: final goods production; a health care sector, selling...

We study the role of health care within a continuous time economy of overlapping generations subject to endogenous mortality. The economy consists of two sectors: final goods production and a health care sector, selling medical services to individuals. Individuals demand health care with a view...

We assess the long-run growth effects of rising longevity and increasing the retirement age when growth is driven by purposeful research and development. In contrast to economies in which growth depends on learning-by-doing spillovers, raising the retirement age fosters economic growth. How...