Health and the Economy in the United States, from 1750 to the Present

Dora Costa

NBER Working Paper No. 19685
Issued in November 2013, Revised in June 2014
NBER Program(s):Program on the Economics of Aging, Program on Children, Program on the Development of the American Economy, Health Care Program, Health Economics Program

I discuss the health transition in the United States, bringing new data to bear on health indicators, and investigating the changing relationship between health, income, and the environment. I argue that scientific advances played an outsize role and that health improvements were largest among the poor. Health improvements were not a precondition for modern economic growth. The gains to health are largest when the economy has moved from "brawn" to "brains" because this is when the wage returns to education are high, leading the healthy to obtain more education. More education may improve use of health knowledge, producing a virtuous cycle.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w19685

Published: Health and the Economy in the United States from 1750 to the Present Dora L. Costa JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE VOL. 53, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2015 (pp. 503-70) citation courtesy of

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