We conduct a panel data analysis of 74 countries over 1980 2000 to investigate whether population health affects foreign direct investment inflows. Our main finding is that health has a positive and significant effect on such inflows for low- and middle-income countries. This finding is...

In a recent paper, Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) argue that the large increases in population health witnessed in the 20th century may have lowered income levels. We argue that this result depends crucially on their assumption that initial health and income do not affect subsequent economic...

This paper uses pooled 1971, 1981, and 1986 Canadian census data to evaluate the extent to which (1) the earnings of Canadian immigrants at the time of immigration fall short of the earnings of comparable Canadian-born individuals, and (2) immigrants' earnings grow more rapidly over time than...

Past research on the health workforce can be structured into three perspectives - "health workforce planning" (1960 through 1970s); "the health worker as economic actor" (1980s through 1990s); and "the health worker as necessary resource" (1990s through 2000s). During the first phase, shortages...

This paper examines the generation and management of solid waste (MSW) through the lens of economics. We estimate that the global burden of MSW amounted to 1.3 billion metric tons in 1990, or 0.67 kilograms of waste per person per day. Industrial countries account for a disproportionate share of...

This study examines the claim that the AIDS epidemic will slow the pace of economic growth. We do this by examining the association, across fifty-one developing and industrial countries for which we were able to assemble data, between changes in the prevalence of AIDS and the rate of growth of...

This paper tests the hypothesis that child support obligations impede remarriage among nonresident fathers. Hazard models fit to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and from the Survey of Income and Program Participation reveal that child support obligations deter remarriage...

We test the view the large differences in income levels we see across the world are due to differences in underlying characteristics, i.e. fundamental forces, against the alternative that there are poverty traps. Taking geographical variables as fundamental characteristics, we find that we can...

Macroeconomists acknowledge the contribution of human capital to economic growth, but their empirical studies define human capital solely in terms of schooling. In this paper, we extend production function models of economic growth to account for two additional variables that microeconomists...

We examine the association between nonmarital childbearing and the subsequent likelihood of first marriage and document a negative association between these variables -- controlling for a variety of potentially confounding influences -- in several large survey data sets for the United States. We...