Environment, Health, and Human Capital

Environment, Health, and Human Capital

T recognition that environmental factors can affect human health can be traced at least as far back as the thirteenth century when the King of England banned the burning of sea-coal in London because it was “prejudicial to health” (Brimblecombe 1999). In the eight-hundred years that have followed, our understanding of biology, chemistry, and medicine have evolved considerably. Alongside large-s...

Nber Working Paper Series Environment, Health, and Human Capital

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to non-random assignment of pollution, economists have employed a wide range of quasi-experimental techniques to de...

Health, Human Capital, and Development.

How much does disease depress development in human capital and income around the world? I discuss a range of micro evidence, which finds that health is both human capital itself and an input to producing other forms of human capital. I use a standard model to integrate these results, and suggest a re-interpretation of much of the micro literature. I then discuss the aggregate implications of mi...

Human Capital, Schooling and Health Returns

A consensus has been forged in the last decade that recent periods of sustained growth in total factor productivity and reduced poverty are closely associated with improvements in a population’s child nutrition, adult health, and schooling, particularly in low-income countries. Estimates of the productive returns from these three forms of human capital investment are nonetheless qualified by a ...

Health as Human Capital: Theory and Implications