Overview
Anne Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Emerita at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. She is best known for her 2015 collaboration with Angus Deaton documenting the reversal of midlife mortality among white non-Hispanic Americans — the phenomenon labeled "deaths of despair." Her research spans health economics, child health, and the long-run consequences of economic disadvantage for health and mortality.
Key Contributions
- Deaths of Despair (Case and Deaton 2015): Co-discovered and documented the post-1998 reversal in all-cause midlife mortality among white non-Hispanic Americans, driven by drug/alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver disease. Established the education gradient (HS or less +134/100,000; BA+ −57/100,000) and the morbidity parallels (self-reported health, pain, functional limitation, inability to work) across multiple national surveys.
- Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century (Case and Deaton 2017): Extended the analysis through 2015, sharpened the education gradient (BA is the clean dividing line; "some college" also shows rising mortality), documented the racial mortality crossover (WNH HS-or-less went from 30% lower to 30% higher than all-BNH mortality 1999–2015), tested and rejected contemporaneous income as the primary driver (BNH/Hispanic incomes tracked WNH, yet their mortality kept falling), and introduced the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis — cohort-entry labor market deterioration cascading through wages, marriage, community, and meaning. Discussants: David Cutler, Adriana Lleras-Muney.
- Extended the deaths of despair framework further in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020), broadening the analysis to institutional explanations for the U.S. divergence.
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