Anthropometrics is a research program that explores the extent to which economic processes affect human biological processes using height and weight as markers. This agenda differs from health economics in the sense that instead of studying diseases or longevity, macro manifestations of well-being, it focuses on cellular-level processes that determine the extent to which the organism thrives in its socio-economic and epidemiological environment. Thus, anthropometric indicators are used as a proxy measure for the biological standard of living as complements to conventional measures based on monetary units.
Using physical stature as a marker, we enabled the profession to learn about the well-being of children and youth for whom market-generated monetary data are not abundant even in contemporary societies. It is now clear that economic transformations such as the onset of the Industrial Revolution and modern economic growth were accompanied by negative externalities that were hitherto unknown. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that the Welfare States of Western and Northern Europe take better care of the biological needs of their citizens than the market-oriented health-care system of the United States.
Obesity has reached pandemic proportions in the United States affecting 40% of the population. It is fostered by a sedentary and harried lifestyle, by the diminution in self-control, the spread of labor-saving technologies, and the rise of instant gratification characteristic of post-industrial society. The spread of television and a fast-food culture in the 1950s were watershed developments in this regard that accelerated the process. Obesity poses a serious health risk including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some types of cancer and its cost reaches $150 billion per annum in the United States or about $1,400 per capita. We conclude that the economy influences not only mortality and health but reaches bone-deep into the cellular level of the human organism. In other words, the economy is inextricably intertwined with human biological processes.
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Anthropometrics: The Intersection of Economics and Human Biology
John Komlos
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Creative Destruction, Technology Disruption, and Growth
Thomas Clarke
The origins of modern technological change provide the context necessary to understand present-day technological transformation, to investigate the impact of the new digital technologies, and to examine the phenomenon of digital disruption of established industries and occupations. How these contemporary technologies will transform industries and institutions, or serve to create new industries and institutions, will unfold in time. The implications of the relationships between these pervasive new forms of digital transformation and the accompanying new business models, business strategies, innovation, and capabilities are being worked through at global, national, corporate, and local levels. Whatever the technological future holds it will be defined by continual adaptation, perpetual innovation, and the search for new potential.
Presently, the world is experiencing the impact of waves of innovation created by the rapid advance of digital networks, software, and information and communication technology systems that have transformed workplaces, cities, and whole economies. These digital technologies are converging and coalescing into intelligent technology systems that facilitate and structure our lives. Through creative destruction, digital technologies fundamentally challenge existing routines, capabilities, and structures by which organizations presently operate, adapt, and innovate. In turn, digital technologies stimulate a higher rate of both technological and business model innovation, moving from producer innovation toward more user-collaborative and open-collaborative innovation. However, as dominant global platform technologies emerge, some impending dilemmas associated with the concentration and monopolization of digital markets become salient. The extent of the contribution made by digital transformation to economic growth and environmental sustainability requires a critical appraisal.
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The Early Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States: An Analysis of the Growth of the NAACP
Daniel Aaronson, Jala Abner, Mark Borgschulte, and Bhashkar Mazumder
A newly digitized panel of county-level branch activity of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is used to describe the potential factors underlying the expansion of political participation in the American South, with a particular emphasis on the short period from the late 1930s through the 1940s. This period has long been recognized for its significant progress in reducing sizable racial gaps in labor market outcomes. But little work in economics has considered the role of political participation in shaping that progress. As the preeminent civil rights organization prior to the 1950s, the NAACP provides a natural lens in which to explore the expansion in political activism during this crucial period. Associative evidence suggests that a few potential channels could be especially worthy of future study, including the role of demographics, increased human capital, expansion in labor demand driven by wartime efforts, reduction in racial violence, latent political activism, and expansions in political and social networks, all of which have been highlighted in a variety of history and social science literatures. However, careful causal empirical work does not currently exist on these factors. Filling in this hole is important for providing compelling evidence on the origins of the 20th century’s most important U.S. political movement, as well as adding to a growing literature in political economy and development economics which examines the role that grassroots activism has played on economic growth and income inequality around the world.
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Earnings Inequality in Latin America: A Three-Decade Retrospective
Manuel Fernández and Gabriela Serrano
Latin American countries have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. However, earnings inequality have significantly changed over time, increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, declining sharply in the 2000s, and stagnating or even increasing in some countries since 2015. Macroeconomic instability in the region in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the introduction of structural reforms like trade, capital, and financial liberalization, affected the patterns of relative demand and relative earnings across skill-demographic groups in the 1990s, increasing inequality. Significant gains in educational attainment, the demographic transition, and rising female labor force participation changed the skill-demographic composition of labor supply, pushing the education and experience premiums downward, but this was not enough to counteract demand-side trends. At the turn of the 21st century, improved external conditions, driven by China’s massive increase in demand for commodities, boosted economies across Latin America, which began to grow rapidly. Growth was accompanied by a positive shift in the relative demand for less-educated workers, stronger labor institutions, rising minimum wages, and declining labor informality, a confluence of factors that reduced earnings inequality. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, particularly after the end of the commodities price boom in 2014, economic growth decelerated, and the pace of inequality decline stagnated. There is extensive literature documenting and trying to explain the causes of recent earnings inequality dynamics in Latin America. This literature is examined in terms of themes, methodological approaches, and key findings. The focus is on earnings inequality and how developments in labor markets have shaped it.
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The Growth of Health Spending in the United States From 1776 to 2026
Thomas E. Getzen
During the 18th and 19th centuries, medical spending in the United States rose slowly, on average about .25% faster than gross domestic product (GDP), and varied widely between rural and urban regions. Accumulating scientific advances caused spending to accelerate by 1910. From 1930 to 1955, rapid per-capita income growth accommodated major medical expansion while keeping the health share of GDP almost constant. During the 1950s and 1960s, prosperity and investment in research, the workforce, and hospitals caused a rapid surge in spending and consolidated a truly national health system. Excess growth rates (above GDP growth) were above +5% per year from 1966 to 1970, which would have doubled the health-sector share in fifteen years had it not moderated, falling under +3% in the 1980s, +2% in 1990s, and +1.5% since 2005. The question of when national health expenditure growth can be brought into line with GDP and made sustainable for the long run is still open. A review of historical data over three centuries forces confrontation with issues regarding what to include and how long events continue to effect national health accounting and policy. Empirical analysis at a national scale over multiple decades fails to support a position that many of the commonly discussed variables (obesity, aging, mortality rates, coinsurance) do cause significant shifts in expenditure trends. What does become clear is that there are long and variable lags before macroeconomic and technological events affect spending: three to six years for business cycles and multiple decades for major recessions, scientific discoveries, and organizational change. Health-financing mechanisms, such as employer-based health insurance, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) are seen to be both cause and effect, taking years to develop and affecting spending for decades to come.
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Monopsony Power, Race, and Gender
Aida Farmand and Teresa Ghilarducci
Most monopsony research leaves out the employer as an active agent. The cause of monopsony rests solely on the workers: Their idiosyncratic preferences, their lack of information, and their geographical isolation create the monopsony conditions. Employers are viewed as mainly passive and only choose to exploit their monopsony potential when the conditions allow. The theoretical passivity of employers leaves out a whole class of behaviors necessary to identify and understand the persistence of monopsony.
For instance, the models consider gender as a monopsony factor because wives and mothers are presumed to have intensely inelastic labor supply functions. Women’s attachment to children and the children’s schools and to their husband’s locational decisions means women are less likely to leave a geographical area to pursue a competitor’s better offer. Again, it is the woman’s idiosyncratic choices that allow for monopsony exploitation.
However, it is likely employers consciously use race and gender stratification to segregate and divide workers to create differential labor supply elasticities and, thus, create monopsony conditions to the firm. A firm would maintain practices that use race to allocate jobs and separate men from women workers to maintain divisions among the workforce. Moreover, government policies that make it difficult for workers to unionize, keep minimum wages low, and subsidize low-paid work through the earned income tax credit help employers create and maintain monopsony power among subaltern groups, nonwhite workers, and women. Future research on monopsony should focus on specific employers’ practices that create monopsony conditions such as providing firm specific childcare, perpetuating occupational segregations, limiting opportunities of promotion for women and nonwhite workers, and lobbying for the wage subsidy programs such as the earned income tax credit.
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The Economic and Political Effects of Immigration: Evidence from the Age of Mass Migration
Marco Tabellini
Between 1850 and 1920, during the Age of Mass Migration, more than 30 million Europeans moved to the United States. European immigrants provided an ample supply of cheap labor as well as specific skills and know-how, contributing to American economic growth. These positive effects were not short-lived, but are still evident in the 21st century: areas of the United States that received more European immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration have higher income per capita, a more educated population, and lower poverty rates. Despite its economic benefits, immigration triggered hostile political reactions, which were driven by cultural differences between immigrants and natives, and culminated in the introduction of country-specific quotas. In contrast to the concerns prevailing at the time, European immigrants eventually assimilated. The process was facilitated by the inflow of 1.5 million African Americans who left the rural South to move to northern and western cities between 1915 and 1930. Black in-migration increased the salience of skin color, as opposed to that of religion and nativity, as a defining feature of in- and out-groups of the society. This reduced the perceived distance between native whites and European immigrants, thereby facilitating the integration of the latter. European immigrants also had long-lasting effects on American ideology. Parts of the country that hosted more immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration have a more liberal ideology and stronger preferences for redistribution well into the 21st century. This resulted from the transmission of political ideology from (more left-leaning) immigrants to natives.
