Economic evaluations of health interventions, such as vaccinations, are important tools for informing health policy. Approaching the analysis from the appropriate perspective is critical to ensuring the validity of evaluation results for particular policy decisions. Using the example of...

This study uses the second National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2) of India to estimate the effect of state public health spending on mortality across all age groups, controlling for individual, household, and state-level covariates. We use a state’s gross fiscal deficit as an instrument for...

Average adult height is a physical measure of the biological standard of living of a population. While the biological and economic standards of living of a population are very different concepts, they are linked and may empirically move together. If this is so, then cohort heights can also be...

This paper examines data on urbanization. We review the most commonly used data sources, and highlight the difficulties inherent in defining and measuring the size of urban versus rural populations. We show that differences in the measurement of urban populations across countries and over time...

Micro-based and macro-based approaches have been used to assess the effects of health on economic growth. Micro-based approaches aggregate the return on individual health from Mincerian wage regressions to derive the macroeconomic effects of population health. Macro-based approaches estimate a...

Acemoglu and Johnson (2007) present evidence that improvements in population health do not promote economic growth. We show that their result depends critically on the assumption that initial health has no causal effect on subsequent economic growth. We argue that such an effect is likely,...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the macroeconomic return to population health. The macro-based approach tends to yield estimates that are either negative and close to zero or positive and an order of magnitude larger than the range of estimates derived from the...

Assuming individual preferences satisfy the Von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms for expected utility we show how we can measure an individual's expected utility of any state using their willingness to accept a gamble over two reference points. The utility function captures the diminishing marginal...

In the past 50 years, the world accelerated its transition out of long-term demographic stability. As infant and child mortality rates fell, populations began to soar. In most countries, this growth led to falling fertility rates. Although fertility has fallen, the population continues to...