Economists and other social scientists tracking the well-being of populations are increasingly interested in the determinants of health and longevity. A growing body of research analyzes the respective contributions of a variety of factors, including air and water pollution, public policies that affect access to medical care, mental health, social norms, and addiction, to life expectancy differences across countries, over time, and within countries. Availability of new and richer data sets has made it possible to develop ever-more-precise estimates of the relative contributions of these and other factors.
To advance research on mortality disparities, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the support of the National Institute of Aging (NIA), will host a two-day conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Thursday and Friday, January 9 and 10, 2025. The conference will be organized by NBER affiliates David Cutler (Harvard University) and Adriana Lleras-Muney (UCLA). The Journal of Human Resources will consider papers presented at the conference for potential publication in a special issue, subject to standard editorial review.
The organizers are particularly interested in work that provides new conceptual frameworks for assessing empirical regularities or that quantifies the contribution of various factors to explaining mortality differences. They welcome perspectives from economics and other disciplines such as demography, public health, medicine, and sociology. Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- The cumulative impact of early shocks, such as family economic distress or exposure to infectious disease, pollution, or political unrest, on later life longevity.
- The extent to which mental health determines health behaviors and mortality, including its role in explaining death of despairs, its contribution to the ongoing opioid epidemic, and its influence through the recent rise in the suicide rate among the young.
- The effect of pollution decline on life expectancy and on the gradient in life expectancy by socio-economic status. How does the effect of pollution on life expectancy compare with the role of medical innovations or internal migration within nations?
- The role of geographic disparities in factors such as weather and health care quality in determining mortality, and the persistence of these effects in the presence of migration at various stages of the life-cycle.
- The role of social norms and institutions in explaining why some populations are not at the frontier of health, including the role of trust between patients and doctors, or governments and their citizens.
- The role of public policies including innovation incentives, health insurance, and the regulation and public provision of health care services, as well as other social policies that are not designed to explicitly improve health, in affecting longevity.
To be considered for presentation at the meeting, please upload papers or extended abstracts no later than 11:59pm EDT on Wednesday, July 31, 2024.
Authors chosen to present papers will be notified by early September. Papers that review existing literature but do not present new research findings will be considered for presentation at the conference, but not for post-conference publication. In keeping with NBER protocols, papers may not make policy recommendations.
The organizers will consider complete papers or papers that will be ready to present by January 2025. Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication. The organizers welcome empirical and theoretical research, papers by scholars who are early in their careers and who are not NBER affiliates, and submissions from researchers who are members of groups that are under-represented in the economics profession. Please feel free to share this call for papers widely with any researchers who might be working on projects that are suitable for presentation.
The NBER will cover hotel and economy-class conference travel for up to two authors per paper. Questions about this meeting should be directed to tricias@nber.org.