ESSAYS ON ECONOMIC GROWTH AND HEALTH

This thesis analyzes some aspects of the relationship between health and economic growth from a theoretical point of view. It consists of two papers, one co-authored and one single-authored. The co-authored paper “Children's health, human capital accumulation, and R&D-based economic growth” describes the role of children's health for human capital accumulation and for long-run economic growth. For this purpose we design an R&D-based growth model in which the stock of human capital of the next generation is determined by parental education and health investments. We show that i) there is a complementarity between education and health: if parents want to have better educated children, they also raise health investments and vice versa; ii) parental health investments exert an unambiguously positive effect on long-run economic growth, iii) faster population growth reduces long-run economic growth. These results are consistent with the empirical evidence for modern economies in the twentieth century. In the single-authored paper “Different Types of Health Expenditures in an OLG framework: living longer or working better?”, the health status of individuals affects their longevity and their labor productivity. We include public health expenditures into an overlapping-generations model. The government faces the trade-off investing its revenues either into the health expenditure that makes the labor force productive, or into the health expenditure that increases life expectancy. We show how the government optimally allocates the resources between the two types of health expenditures. The results are remarkable because by using a straightforward structure of the economy, we are able to combine two strings of the existing literature about the impacts of health: higher life expectancy and higher worker productivity.