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 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...

The program project Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease and Death investigates how socioeconomic and environmental factors in early life can shape health and work levels in later life. Project researchers have approached this problem by creating a life-cycle sample that permits a...

One of the most important debates among health economists in rich nations is whether advances in biotechnology will spare their health care systems from a financial crisis. We must consider that prevalence rates of chronic diseases declined during the twentieth century and that this rate of...

At the close of World War II, the future of economic development was the subject of wide-ranging debates. Historical experience has since shown that these forecasts were uniformly too pessimistic. Expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation, which...

To American and European economists in 1945, the countries of Asia were unpromising candidates for high economic growth. In 1950 even the most prosperous of these countries had a per capita income less than 25 percent of that of the United States. Between the mid-1960s and the end of the...