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We develop a macroeconomic theory of the division of household tasks between servants and own work and how it is affected by automation in households and firms. We calibrate the model for the U.S. and apply it to explain the historical development of household time use and the distribution of household tasks from 1900 to 2020. The economy is populated by high-skilled and low-skilled households and household tasks are performed by own work, machines, or servants. For the period 1900-1960, innovations in household automation motivate the decline of the servant economy and the creation of new household tasks motivates an almost constant division of household time between wage work and domestic work. For the period 1960-2020, innovations in firm automation and the implied increase of the skill premium explain the return of the servant economy. We show the robustness of results to the introduction of time trends in skilled-labor supply and the consideration of endogenous demand for leisure. With counterfactual experiments we address the effects of task-dependent disutility of work and of innovations in servant efficiency (the Gig economy). We provide supporting evidence for inequality as a driver of the return of the servant economy in a regional panel of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas for the period 2005-2020.

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of occupational choice with endogenous health behavior, aging, and longevity. Health-demanding work leads to a faster accumulation of health deficits and is remunerated with a hazard markup on wages. Health deficit accumulation is also influenced by unhealthy consumption and health care expenditure. I calibrate the model for a 20 year old average American in 2010 and show the following results, among others. Health-demanding work is ceteris paribus preferred by male, young, and healthy individuals with a relatively low level of education. Health demanding work has a negligible effect on health behavior because income and health investment effects largely offset each other, implying that health effects can be attributed almost fully to the direct health burden of work. Better medical technology induces low-skilled individuals to spend a greater part of their life in health-demanding work and thus increases the health gradient of education. High wealth endowments protect against unhealthy occupational choices. I show robustness of the results in an extension of the model with regard to endogenous retirement.

In this paper, we develop a life cycle model in which health and longevity are threatened by infectious and chronic diseases. The model captures that the susceptibility and severity of infectious diseases depend on the accumulated health deficits (immunosenescence) and that the life history of infections affects the accumulation of chronic health deficits (inammaging). Individuals invest in their health to slow down health deficit accumulation and take measures to protect themselves from infectious diseases. We calibrate the model for an average American and explore how health expenditure, life expectancy, and the value of life depend on individual characteristics, medical technology, and the disease environment. We then use counterfactual computational experiments of the U.S. epidemiological transition 1860-2010 to show that the decline of infectious diseases caused a substantial decline of chronic diseases and contributed more to increasing life expectancy than advances in the treatment of chronic diseases. Finally, we use the model to investigate behaviour and long-term health outcomes in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We predict that the pandemic will shorten the life expectancy of middle-aged people almost as much as that of older people because of inammaging and the self-productivity of health deficits.

For the population over 65, long-term care (LTC) expenditure constitutes a considerable share in health care expenditures. In this paper, we decompose health care into medical care, intended to improve one’s state of health, and personal care required for daily routine. Personal care can be either carried out autonomously or by a third party. In the course of aging, autonomous personal care is gradually substituted by LTC. We set up a life-cycle model in which individuals are subject to physiological aging, calibrate it with data from gerontology, and analyze the interplay between medical care and LTC. In comparative dynamic analyses, our theory-based approach allows us to causally investigate the impact of better health and rising life expectancy, triggered by higher income and better medical technology, on the expected expenditures for LTC in the future. We predict a 1.75-percentage increase in expected LTC expenditure per percentage increase in life expectancy. In terms of present value at age 20, this elasticity declines to around 1 percent. Even when considering different magnitudes of shocks in medical technology and income, we find that these elasticities remain remarkably stable.

Empirical evidence for the U.S. suggests that the consumption of intoxicants increases in association with the socio-economic deprivation of the middle-class. To explore the underlying mechanisms, we set up a task-based labor market model with endogenous mental health status and a health care system. The decline of tasks that were historically performed by the middle class and the associated decline in relative wages and socio-economic status increases the share of mentally ill middle class workers. Mentally ill workers can mitigate their hardships by the intake of illicit drugs or by consuming health goods. We argue that explaining the drug epidemic of the U.S. middle class requires an interaction of socio-economic decline and falling opioid prices. One factor in isolation is typically insufficient. Our analysis also points to a central role of the health care system. In our model, extending mental health care could motivate the mentally ill to abstain from illicit drug consumption.

In this paper, I combine economic theories of health behavior and addiction in order to explain the phenomenon of anorexia nervosa and its impact on health and longevity. Individuals consume normal goods and foods and can work off excess calories with physical exercise. There exists a healthy body mass index and deviations from it increasingly cause health deficits due to obesity or underweight. There exists also a subjective target weight and being heavier than target weight causes a loss of utility from body image. Individuals for whom the utility loss from missing target weight is large exert more weight control, i.e. they eat less and exercise more. Anorexia is initiated in individuals who are particularly successful in weight control and prone to addiction. Addiction to weight control motivates anorexic individuals to perpetually adjust their target weight downwards and to eat less and exercise more. With declining weight, health deficits accumulate faster and mortality risk rises. I calibrate the model to a reference American with bmi 28. Due to weight loss addiction, the bmi gradually declines to a level of 15 and causes a loss of 21 years of life expectancy at the age of 20.

A core mechanism of unified growth theory is that accelerating technological progress induces mass education and, in interaction with child quantity-quality substitution, a decline in fertility. Using unique new data for 21 OECD countries over the period 1750-2000, we test, for the first time, the validity of this core mechanism of unified growth theory. We measure a country's technological progress as patents per capita, genetic-distance weighted foreign patents, and investment in machinery, equipment and intellectual property products. Controlling for other confounders like income, mortality, the gender wage gap, indicators for child labor, compulsory schooling, and time- and countryfixed effects, we establish a strong positive impact of technological progress on investments in education and a strongly negative one on fertility. Using two-stage regressions, we assess the child quantity-quality substitution that can be motivated by technological change. We estimate that a 10 percent increase of enrollment in primary and secondary school is associated with a decline of the general fertility rate by 3 to 4 percent.

We investigate health and aging before and after retirement for specific occupational groups. We use five waves of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and construct a frailty index for elderly men and women from 10 European countries. Occupational groups are classified according to low vs. high education, blue vs. white collar color, and high vs. low physical or psychosocial job burden. Controlling for individual fixed effects, we find that, regardless of the used classification, workers from the first (low status) group display more health deficits at any age and accumulate health deficits faster than workers from the second (high status) group. We instrument retirement by statutory retirement ages (“normal” and “early”) and find that the health of workers in low status occupations benefits greatly from retirement, whereas retirement effects for workers in high status occupations are small and frequently insignificant. We also find that workers from low status occupations always have higher health deficits, i.e. we find evidence for an occupational health gradient that widens with increasing age, before and after retirement.