American Delusion: Life Expectancy and Welfare in the United States from an International Perspective

Rodrigo Soares, Rudi Rocha and Michel Szklo

Journal of Human Capital, 2022, vol. 16, issue 1, 73 - 132

Abstract: Recent increases in mortality are at the forefront of the public health debate in the United States. This paper takes a comparative international perspective and documents the poor relative performance of life expectancy in the United States. We characterize its age and cause of death profiles over time and estimate its welfare implications. We show that this poor performance is not recent, not restricted to very particular causes of death, but mostly driven by adults and older ages. We calculate that recent welfare gains could have been 19%–28% higher had the United States been able to reproduce the life expectancy performance of the average member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/717543 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/717543 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jhucap:doi:10.1086/717543

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Human Capital from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().