This short essay reviews Gary Becker's contributions and influence in health economics. It was originally prepared for …

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the macroeconomic return to population health. The … the macroeconomic return to health. We reconcile the two approaches by controlling for the indirect effects of health … of health. Our results show that the macroeconomic return to health lies in the range of plausible microeconomic …

We present a generalized solution to Grossman's model of health capital (1972), relaxing the widely used assumption … that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an "optimalʺ level without adjustment costs. The Grossman … model then predicts the existence of a health threshold above which individuals do not demand medical care. Our generalized …