I'm sorry to inform you that Björn Lindgren, an NBER research associate in the health economics program since 2008, passed away in Sweden on June 14. He was diagnosed with ALS not that long ago and deteriorated rapidly. Björn spent his entire professional career at Lund University, where he served as director of a PhD specialization in health economics and in a similar capacity in a health economics research center. He made key contributions to the literature in health economics, including studies of the production of and demand for health in a family context, the role of risk perceptions, the role of risk perceptions in the demand for goods that are harmful to health, and the effects of increases in population longevity on the health care system. His most recent NBER working paper, which was published in the Journal of Health Economics in 2016, contained a penetrating treatment of the implications of non-monotonic effects on health-positive at some levels but negative at other levels-of behaviors such as exercise and the consumption of goods such as alcohol and food have on the demand for these behaviors and goods.
I interacted with Björn both on a professional basis and on a personal basis since I met him in June 1996. He invited me to give a paper at a conference he organized on the economics of substance use at a resort in Mölle, near Lund. My wife Ilene came with me and we hit it off with Björn and his wife Inger from the minute that we met them. It is an understatement to say that we became great good friends.
Ilene and I have visited Björn and Inger in Sweden a number of times and they have visited us a number of times. We have loved touring Sweden and Denmark with them, with Björn serving as the driver and guide. We also have loved touring in New York, Boston, Washington, Virginia, and North Carolina with them, with Ilene and me serving as drivers and Ilene serving as guide. We enjoyed and benefitted from Björn's knowledge of restaurants with great food and fine wines (and great beer for me), and even I would join Björn, Inger, and Ilene for the traditional glass of champagne before dinner.
On a professional level, Björn and I had common interests in economic models of the demand for health, the economics of unhealthy behaviors and the relationship between education and health. He published key contributions to those areas in leading economics journals including the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. As a result of our common research interests in health economics, Björn and I became series co-editors of Advances in Health Economics and Health Services, published by Elsevier when we assume these positions in 2003 and now published by Emerald Press. We already had agreed to organize a conference on the economics of substance abuse, which was held in 2004 in Lund. We co-edited the volume that resulted from the conference, and it was published in the Advances series in 2005.
Björn and I continued as series co-editors through 2017 when I stepped down. Along the way we were joined by his former student Kristian Bolin and my former student Bob Kaestner. The four of us and three other economists organized a conference on human capital and health behaviors, which was held at Gothenburg University in May 2016. We co-edited a volume based on that conference that was published in the Advances series this past August.
Our personal and professional relationships reached a new high when Björn and Kristian arranged for me to spend my last sabbatical at Lund University during the spring semester of 2016. Ilene and I lived in a guest apartment very near to the main campus of the university. I shared Björn's office with him and saw him almost every day. Ilene and I did something with Inger and him at least twice a week.
I owed a real debt to Björn for arranging my sabbatical because Lund was a great place for me to write a good deal of the introductions and afterwords to the four parts of my book Determinants of Health: An Economic Perspective. I owed him a second debt because the papers in both volumes in the Advances series were intimately related to many of the papers in my book, and my interactions with Björn as series co-editors greatly advanced my own research agenda. I owed him a third debt for writing a terrific new forward to the re-issued version of my 1972 NBER monograph The Demand for Health: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation.
Björn Lindgren was a very fine economist and a great friend. I'm very sorry for the loss that the health economics program has suffered.
Michael Grossman
National Bureau of Economic Research
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Received on Sun Jun 17 2018 - 10:10:33 EDT
