Health and labor supply : theoretical essays and reflections on the history of economic thought.

Summary This thesis includes a series of theoretical essays on the macroeconomic study of health, and also offers a reflection on the recent history of economic thought. Its main contribution is to show that health does not necessarily follow from economic development. The first chapter is an investigation of contemporary differences in mortality between the United States and Europe. He proposes an explanation of the American Puzzle, the fact that life expectancy is lower in the United States despite a higher share of GDP devoted to health expenditures. Considering the deleterious effect of long working hours on health, differences in working hours may explain Americans' poor health and excessive spending, emphasizing a trade-off between consumption and health. The second chapter takes a more historical perspective and theorizes the decline in the average skill level of the population during the Industrial Revolution in England, looking at the political motivations of the capitalist class to invest in public health measures that would increase the longevity of workers and their incentives to educate themselves. The nature of technical progress in the nineteenth century, biased towards low-skilled work, may explain why the life expectancy of the working classes did not take off sooner. The third chapter is a reflection on the history of modern macroeconomics. It documents more than thirty years of controversy about the value of the elasticity of labor supply and questions the aggregation of individual behavior and the hypothesis of a representative agent.