the lazarus drug the impact of antiretroviral therapy on economic growth abstract does better population health lead to growth in per capita income theory is ambiguous and empirical evidence is very limited in 2001 a steep fall in antiretroviral arv drug prices triggered rapid and massive expansion of arv therapy coverage in lower income countries exploiting the sharp resultant changes in population health i show that arv therapy coverage expansion led to growth in gdp per capita the positive effects on growth most likely persist for around four years arv therapy coverage expansion could explain around a third of the sub saharan african growth miracle

the contribution of female health to economic development we analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health we do this through developing and calibrating a novel micro founded dynamic general equilibrium model in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for health related gender differences in productivity we show that better female health speeds up the demographic transition and thereby the take off toward sustained economic growth by contrast male health improvements delay the transition and take off because ceteris paribus they raise fertility investing in female health is therefore a potent lever for promoting development

disease and development the effect of life expectancy on economic growth we exploit the major international health improvements from the 1940s to estimate the effect of life expectancy on economic performance we construct predicted mortality using preintervention mortality rates from various diseases and dates of global interventions predicted mortality has a large impact on changes in life expectancy starting in 1940 but no effect before 1940 using predicted mortality as an instrument we find that a 1 percent increase in life expectancy leads to a 1 7 2 percent increase in population life expectancy has a much smaller effect on total gdp however consequently there is no evidence that the large increase in life expectancy raised income per capita

disease and development evidence from the american south hookworm and malaria parasites that remain a significant public health threat in the tropical belt today were endemic in the american south as late as the first half of the twentieth century i discuss how the successful eradication of malaria and hookworm in the american south affected human capital accumulation i find that areas that had higher levels of malaria or hookworm infection prior to eradication experienced greater increases in school attendance and literacy afterwards moreover i find that adults earned substantially more if they were not exposed to these diseases as children the estimates are large relative to the subsequent convergence between the north and south in the united states but small compared to the cross country distribution of income nevertheless the results indicate potentially large benefits of public health interventions in developing countries jel i12 j24 o10 h43

the determinants of mortality mortality rates have fallen dramatically over time starting in a few countries in the 18th century and continuing to fall today in just the past century life expectancy has increased by over 30 years at the same time mortality rates remain much higher in poor countries with a difference in life expectancy between rich and poor countries of also about 30 years this difference persists despite the remarkable progress in health improvement in the last half century at least until the hiv aids pandemic in both the time series and the cross section data there is a strong correlation between income per capita and mortality rates a correlation that also exists within countries where richer better educated people live longer we review the determinants of these patterns over history over countries and across groups within countries while there is no consensus about the causal mechanisms we tentatively identify the application of scientific advance and technical progress some of which is induced by income and facilitated by education as the ultimate determinant of health such an explanation allows a consistent interpretation of the historical cross country and within country evidence we downplay direct causal mechanisms running from income to health

disease and development a reply to bloom canning and fink bloom canning and fink 2014 argue that the results in acemoglu and johnson 2006 2007 are not robust because initial level of life expectancy in 1940 should be included in our regressions of changes in gdp per capita on changes in life expectancy we assess their claims controlling for potential lagged effects of initial life expectancy using data from 1900 employing a nonlinear estimator suggested by their framework and using information from microeconomic estimates on the effects of improving health there is no evidence for a positive effect of life expectancy on gdp per capita in this important historical episode this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

disease and development revisited 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 primarily because childhood health affects adult productivity in our augmented model which includes initial health the instrumental variable proposed by acemoglu and johnson has no significant predictive power for improvements in health and does not identify the effect of contemporaneous improvements in health on economic growth this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

your money or your life green growth policies and welfare in 2050 this paper proposes a simple index of economic progress that weighs in the monetary cost induced by climate change mitigation policies as well as the health benefits arising from the reduction in local air pollution the shadow price of pollution is calculated indirectly through its impact on life expectancy taking into account the health benefits of mitigation policies significantly reduces their monetary cost in china and india as well as in countries with large fossil based energy producing sectors australia canada and the united states

the long run relationship between trade and population health evidence from five decades in recent years the increase in international trade has sparked a debate about the impact of international trade on population health to date however there has been very little econometric research on the relationship between these two variables this paper examines the long run relationship between trade openness and population health for a sample of 74 countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010 using panel time series techniques it is shown that international trade in general has a robust positive long run effect on health as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality this effect tends to be greater in countries with lower development levels higher taxes on income profits and capital gains and less restrictive business and labour market regulations

estimation of latent class models with heterogeneous choice probabilities an application to market structuring recently grover and srinivasan developed a latent class based approach to analyze market structure by using brand switching data the authors provide an iterative maximum likelihood procedure for

on the multiplicity of perfect equilibria in a dynamic oligopoly abstract in this paper we study the subgame perfect equilibrium solution of a dynamic oligopoly model we show how there exists a family of perfect equilibria since the perfectness concept does not encompass regularity conditions on the feedback rules

life expectancy and human capital evidence from the international epidemiological transition exploiting preintervention variation in mortality from various infectious diseases together with the time variation arising from medical breakthroughs in the late 1940s and the 1950s this study examines how a large positive shock to life expectancy influenced the formation of human capital within countries during the second half of the 20th century the results establish that the rise in life expectancy was behind a significant part of the increase in human capital over this period according to the baseline estimate for one additional year of life expectancy years of schooling increase by 0 17 year moreover the evidence suggests that declines in pneumonia mortality are the underlying cause of this finding indicating that improved childhood health increases human capital investments

cause of death and development in the us abstract exploiting cross state variation in infectious causes of death along with time variation arising from medical innovations toward the middle of the twentieth century this study examines the consequences of a positive health shock in the us it establishes that states with higher levels of mortality from infectious causes prior to the onset of the era of big medicine experienced greater increases in life expectancy population and total gdp after its onset whereas per capita gdp remained largely unchanged together the evidence suggests that the rise in life expectancy had no significant effect on living standards in the us during the time period 1940 1980 these results are robust to controlling for initial health and initial economic conditions

estimating loyalty and switching with an application to the automobile market a brand switching model that considers the choices previous choice current choice and substitute choice if the current choice were not available is developed and estimated an important assumption of the model is that the market consists of two types of consumers loyals and shoppers the model provides estimates for 1 the proportion of loyals in a submarket and 2 the success of each submarket in capturing shoppers we illustrate how the model can be used to characterize the competitive structure of a market we also show how the estimated parameters of the model can be validated using simulation and a theoretically derived covariance matrix our empirical application to automobile data from j d power and associates provides insights into several interesting marketing phenomena including 1 the competitiveness of domestic versus foreign makes of automobiles 2 competition between submarkets defined by form and 3 the effect of previous dealer experience on loyalty and shopping

testing competitive market structures an accurate understanding of the structure of competition is important in the formulation of many marketing strategies for example in new product launch product reformulation or positioning decisions the strategist wants to know which of his competitors will be most affected and hence most likely to respond many marketing science models have been proposed to identify market structure in this paper we examine the managerial problem and propose a criterion by which to judge an identified market structure basically our criterion is a quantification of the intuitive managerial criterion that a submarket is a useful conceptualization if it identifies which products are most likely to be affected by our marketing strategies we formalize this criterion within the structure of classical hypothesis testing so that a marketing scientist can use statistical statements to evaluate a market structure identified by 1 behavioral hypotheses 2 managerial intuition or 3 market structure identification algorithms mathematically our criterion is based on probabilities of switching to products in the situation where an individual s most preferred product is not available submarkets are said to exist when consumers are statistically more likely to buy again in that submarket than would be predicted based on an aggregate constant ratio model for example product attributes e g brand form size use situations e g coffee in the morning versus coffee at dinner and user characteristics e g heavy versus light users are specified as hypotheses for testing alternate competitive structures measurement and estimation procedures are described and a convergent approach is illustrated an application of the methodology to the coffee market is presented and managerial implications of six other applications are described briefly

vaccination and gdp growth rates exploring the links in a conditional convergence framework summary vaccination rates vary significantly across countries and the intensity of vaccination programs is a matter of public choice infrastructure limitations budget constraints and many other factors the link between better health and better economic performance is by now well established and many vaccines have been shown to generate significant roi in a classical cost benefit framework to our knowledge the longer term macroeconomic benefits of improved vaccination programs have not been estimated we modify the standard conditional convergence model to account for changes in vaccination rates across time and countries and use the modified model to estimate the macroeconomic gains from improved vaccination rates using the dtp vaccine as a proxy for vaccination programs generally we find evidence to suggest economically and statistically significant and sustained increases in the gdp growth rate associated with lagged increases in vaccination rates furthermore we find these effects increasing over time we find that investments of the sort made by the global alliance for vaccination and immunization gavi are linked to measurably higher dtp rates and we estimate the returns to such investments as at least 12 1 for countries on the threshold of graduating from gavi these results suggest that much is at stake reducing investment in vaccination could reverse both the public health improvements and tangible economic benefits associated with ongoing improvements in vaccination rates

population and conflict medical innovations during the 1940s quickly resulted in significant health improvements around the world countries with initially higher mortality from infectious diseases experienced larger increases in life expectancy population and subsequent social conflict this cross country result is robust across alternative measures of conflict and is not driven by differential trends between countries with varying baseline characteristics a similar effect is also present within mexico initial suitability conditions for malaria varied across municipalities and anti malaria campaigns had differential effects on population growth and social conflict both across countries and within mexico increased conflict over scarce resources predominates and this effect is more pronounced during times of economic hardship specifically in countries with a poor growth record and in drought stricken areas in mexico at least during this time period a larger increase in population made social conflict more likely

barriers to prosperity parasitic and infectious diseases iq and economic development iq scores differ substantially across nations this study argues that cross country variations in iq scores to a large extent reflect the burden of parasitic and infectious diseases pids and iron and iodine deficiency iid in infancy and in utero furthermore it is shown that the prevalence of health insults through the channel of cognitive ability is influential for the level as well as the growth in productivity across the world using data for 181 countries and an instrumental variable approach regressions reveal that the prevalence of pid iids is influential for growth and income inequalities globally

the effect of health on economic growth a production function approach abstract we estimate a production function model of aggregate economic growth including two variables that microeconomists have identified as fundamental components of human capital work experience and health our main result is that good health has a positive sizable and statistically significant effect on aggregate output even when we control for experience of the workforce we argue that the life expectancy effect in growth regressions appears to be a real labor productivity effect and is not the result of life expectancy acting as a proxy for worker experience

how to measure the economic impact of vector borne diseases at country level vector borne diseases vbds are widespread in less developed countries and reemerging in developed ones available economic studies agree that vbds have significant effects on countries economic outcomes and affirm that a systematic evaluation of such effects is crucial for the efficient allocation of resources to health related priorities this paper provides a comparative assessment of available methodologies for measuring the economic impact of vbds at national level we review both macroeconometric and micro based approaches and examine advantages and disadvantages of current methods we conclude by suggesting possible areas for future research

the rise in life expectancy and economic growth in the 20th century this research exploits conditional exogenous variation in mortality from the diffusion of modern medicine to study the effect of growth in life expectancy on the growth in gdp per capita the empirical analysis establishes that countries that obtained higher growth rates of life expectancy due to this shock to mortality in the mid twentieth century experienced lower growth rates of gdp per capita in the second half of the twentieth century in addition a negative relationship between initial level of life expectancy and the subsequent growth rate of gdp per capita is found

accounting for the effect of health on economic growth i use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on gdp per capita i employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health which i combine with cross country and historical data on height adult survival rates and age at menarche using my preferred estimate eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log gdp per worker by 9 9 percent and reduce the ratio of gdp per worker at the 90th percentile to gdp per worker at the loth percentile from 20 5 to 17 9 while this effect is economically significant it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross country regressions

oligopoly extraction of a common property natural resource the importance of the period of commitment in dynamic games the theory of noncooperative dynamic games has provided an extremely powerful framework for studying many of the classic questions in industrial organization for example questions about resource extraction advertising research and development investment in new capacity and barriers to entry where interactions over time among few firms are involved however an important methodological issue arises when economic competition over time is modeled as a dynamic game the issue is the appropriate formulation of the players strategy spaces

fertility choice mortality expectations and interdependent preferences an empirical analysis we investigate the empirical relationship between child mortality and fertility across 46 low and middle income countries specifically we model the effect of mortality expectations and interdependent fertility preferences on fertility the direct marginal effect of mortality expectations on fertility is larger than zero but less than unity this implies that a decrease in mortality rates leads to a decrease in children born but to an increase in the number of surviving children and hence the rate of population growth taking into account interdependent fertility preferences whereby an individual s fertility choice affects the fertility decisions of others the marginal effect of mortality expectations on fertility becomes one hence if we allow for both mortality expectations and the amplifying effect of interdependent fertility preferences a decrease in child mortality has no net effect on the rate of population growth

the effect of health improvements due to tobacco control on earnings in the united states there is minimal evidence causally estimating the relationship between tobacco tax policy population health and earnings this article uses state tobacco taxes as an instrument for life expectancy to estimate the effect on earnings per capita in a panel of almost 3000 counties in the united states over the period 1970 to 2000 in the first stage of the model we find that a one dollar increase in state tobacco taxes significantly increases life expectancy between 1 9 and 2 1 despite showing that tobacco tax is correlated with higher life expectancy and that theoretically improvements in health from reductions in smoking should lead to increased earnings we find an insignificant impact of the induced gains in life expectancy from tobacco policy on county level earnings per capita over the period 1970 to 2000 the lack of significance is explained through local average treatment effects and the smaller economic impact of certain policies that impact health later in life these results provide further

marketing and investment policies of duopolists in a growing industry abstract this article deals with the analysis of the investment price and advertising policies of two firms competing over time the problem is stated as a differential game where each firm tries to maximize its net present value the open loop equilibrium of the game defines the policies to be implemented by the competitors over the horizon the results show how the combination of competition and growth has a relevant influence on the policies of the firms

a dynamic game of r and d patent protection and competitive behavior a theory of dynamic optimal resource allocation to r and d in an n firm industry is developed using differential games this technique represents a synthesis of the analytic methods previously applied to the problem static game theory and optimal control the use of particular functional forms allows the computation and detailed discussion of the nash equilibrium in investment rules this paper addresses the problem of resource allocation to research and development among the important issues that a firm engaging in r and d must evaluate are uncertainty regarding the feasibility and profitability of a particular innovation the possibility of a protracted development period the possibility that a rival firm may innovate first capturing either a patent or a significant share of the new market the possibility that a rival firm may imitate the innovation and appropriate some of the profits in the new market in what follows we will develop a theory of optimal resource allocation to research and development which incorporates the aspects of r and d enumerated above we will use a dynamic game theoretic analysis determining the nash equilibrium strategies for n identical firms the availability of perfect patent protection is shown to accelerate development of the innovation and the effect of increasing rivalry is addressed the impact of increasing rivalry on nash equilibrium investment in r and d depends upon the degree of appropriability of rewards if patent protection is perfect then increasing the number of nash rivals results in increased r and d effort however when imitation is rewarded the opposite may be true finally some notions of competitive and perfectly competitive equilibrium are examined in the context of the model developed below