This book explores the relationship between the material standard of living and health, both across countries and over time. Above all, Deaton is interested in the question of whether income growth contributes significantly to better health. His answer is no: saving lives in poor countries is not expensive, and there are many episodes of massive health improvements in the absence of income growth. As an alternative, he argues that the cross-sectional correlation between health and income is induced by variation in institutional quality, while over time, parallel improvements in income and health have been a result of advancing knowledge. (JEL E23, I12, I14, I15, O15, O47)

This paper examines a novel mechanism linking fertility and growth. There are three components to the model: first, increases in capital per worker raise women's relative wages, since capital is more complementary to women's labor input than to men's. Second, increasing women's relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income. And third, lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker. This positive feedback loop generates a demographic transition: a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth.

ABSTRACT Low unionization rates, a falling real federal minimum wage, and outsourcing have hampered wage growth in the low-wage sector in the United States for several decades. In recent years (2014–2023), a number of large private retailers—including some of the largest employers in the United States—have opted to institute or raise company-wide, voluntary minimum wages (VMWs) for their employees. We use anonymized payroll data from a large credit bureau and a major payroll provider to study the effects of these national retailer policies on adopting employers’ own wages and employment as well as their spillovers to other employers in shared local labor markets, variously defined. Using stacked event studies centered around multiple VMW events and a continuous treatment variable defined as the gap between local-area wages and the company minimum, we find that VMWs result in sizable wage increases and reductions in turnover at the companies that implement them. Turning to wages at other companies, we estimate small, often economically negligible, spillover effects across multiple measures of exposure to VMWs and numerous definitions of relevant competitors, including firms connected by worker flows. Together, the evidence points to little role for strategic interactions in the transmission of large retailers’ wage policies to other firms. Voluntary minimum wage policies have affected over 3 million jobs at adopting employers, yet their impact on the broader labor market is limited.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty uses the market value of tradable assets to measure both productive capital and wealth. As a measure of wealth this is problematic because it ignores the value of human capital and transfer wealth, which have grown enormously over the last 300 years. Thus the constancy of the wealth/income ratio as portrayed in his data is an illusion. Further, the types of wealth that he does not measure are more equally distributed than tradable assets. The approach also incorrectly identifies capital gains due to reduced discount rates as increases in the capital stock.

This paper examines how population growth affects the average level of utility particularly the consumption per capita. It also focuses on the effects of population growth on the ratio of dependent consumers to working-age adults. The model employed in this paper has three demographic groups: working-age adults who produce and consume and the young and elderly who only consume. This study concluded that the transition to lower population growth requires a long period of reduced dependency in which society benefits from lower spending on children while it has yet to pay for higher old-age dependency. The dependency level after 30 years is not significantly different from that which would exist in an optimal stable population. Any rise in fertility that would decrease old-age dependency in the long run would require a lengthy period of higher-than-steady-state dependency.

This paper examines popular advice on portfolio allocation among cash, bonds, and stocks. It documents that this advice is inconsistent with the mutual-fund separation theorem, which states that all investors should hold the same composition of risky assets. In contrast to the theorem, popular advisors recommend that aggressive investors hold a lower ratio of bonds to stocks than conservative investors. The paper explores various possible explanations of this puzzle and finds them unsatisfactory.

We study the mobile phone-based money transfer system in Kenya. Based on aggregate data, we estimate that the velocity with which units of e-money are transferred among users is approximately four times per month, and that the average number of transfers undergone by a unit of e-money between its creation and destruction is approximately one. Most M-Pesa transactions are made by frequent users. Examination of data on withdrawals shows a high frequency of small withdrawals and no response to “notches” in the price schedule, indicating that many users seem to have high implicit discount rates.

The founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1914 led to a substantial change in the behavior of nominal interest rates. We examine the timing of this change and the speed with which it was effected. We then use data on the term structure of interest rates to determine how expectations responded. Our results indicate that the change in policy regime was rapid and that individuals quickly understood the new environment they were facing.