Anne Case

Anne Case
Born	Anne Catherine Case 7/27/1958
Birthplace	United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Economist, academic
Title	Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus
Employer	Princeton University
Known for	Research on "deaths of despair," health economics, mortality trends
Education	Ph.D. in Economics, Princeton University
Spouse(s)	Angus Deaton
Awards	Cozzarelli Prize (PNAS), elected to National Academy of Sciences (2020)
Website	https://scholar.princeton.edu/accase/home

Anne Catherine Case (born July 27, 1958) is an American economist whose research sits at the intersection of health and economics. For decades at Princeton University, where she held the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs chair before transitioning to emeritus status, Case rose to international prominence through collaborative work with Angus Deaton, her co-author and husband. Together, they documented a reversal in life expectancy trends among middle-aged white Americans without college degrees—a phenomenon they termed "deaths of despair."

Their 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attracted widespread attention by demonstrating that suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease were driving unprecedented increases in midlife mortality among a specific demographic group. This challenged prevailing assumptions among economists about health progress in wealthy nations and sparked extensive public debate about the social and economic forces undermining working-class well-being in America. Beyond that signature work, Case's scholarship spans development economics, labor economics, and the economics of aging, including substantial field research in Southern Africa. In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and she has won multiple academic prizes for her contributions.

Early Life

Anne Catherine Case was born on July 27, 1958, in the United States. She developed early interests in economic questions about social welfare and public health—interests that would define her scholarly career. She pursued economics in her higher education, eventually gravitating toward rigorous empirical methods that would characterize her later investigations into health disparities and mortality.

Education

Case completed her Ph.D. in economics at Princeton University, joining the university's tradition of applied microeconomic research. Her graduate training emphasized econometrics and the analysis of large-scale survey data—skills that became foundational for her later investigations into the determinants of health and economic well-being across populations. Her curriculum vitae, available through Princeton's faculty website, documents her education and early academic appointments in detail.

Career

Academic Appointments at Princeton

Case spent most of her academic career at Princeton University. She rose through the faculty ranks to become the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, a named chair jointly appointed in the Department of Economics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and eventually transitioned to emeritus status. She taught courses in health economics, development economics, and public policy, supervising numerous doctoral students along the way. Princeton placed her within a community of economists working on applied empirical questions, including her eventual co-author and husband, Angus Deaton.

The International Monetary Fund's Finance & Development magazine described her as "The Longevity Economist" in a 2024 profile, a title reflecting how central mortality and lifespan research became to her identity as a scholar. The profile detailed her work on how economic conditions shape health outcomes across the lifespan.

Development Economics and Health Research

Before the American mortality research brought her wide public attention, Case had built substantial work in development economics and health economics, focusing particularly on Southern Africa. Her publications span topics including the economic consequences of orphanhood in Africa, how social pensions affect household welfare, and the relationship between economic shocks and child health in developing countries.

This earlier work established her expertise in using microdata from household surveys to draw inferences about causal relationships between economic resources, social circumstances, and health. Her South Africa research examined how extending social pension benefits to Black South Africans after apartheid ended affected household composition, child nutrition, and school enrollment. Those studies contributed to broader debates about designing social safety nets in developing countries.

The "Deaths of Despair" Research

The research that made Case's name internationally began in the mid-2010s. In November 2015, she and Angus Deaton published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting a startling reversal: all-cause mortality among middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 had been rising since 1999, reversing decades of steady decline. The increase was concentrated among those without a four-year college degree and was driven primarily by three causes: drug and alcohol poisonings, including opioid overdoses; suicides; and alcoholic liver disease.

The findings contradicted a long-established pattern. For decades, mortality had fallen at every age in the United States and in other wealthy nations. While mortality continued to fall for Black and Hispanic Americans and for populations in peer countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia, white non-Hispanic Americans in midlife faced a health crisis with no parallel in the developed world. Case and Deaton estimated that had the prior trend of declining mortality continued, approximately half a million deaths would have been averted between 1999 and 2013.

The 2015 paper generated immediate and extensive media coverage, academic commentary, and policy discussion. A New York Times article noted the significance of the findings while drawing attention to how credit for joint research in economics is sometimes distributed unevenly along gender lines—even accomplished female economists such as Case occasionally received less recognition for collaborative work than their male co-authors.

Follow-Up Research and the Brookings Papers

Case and Deaton expanded on their initial findings in a 2017 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity publication titled "Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century." They deepened their analysis of education's role in mortality divergence and examined rising rates of morbidity alongside deaths. Chronic pain, mental distress, and difficulty with daily activities were increasing among Americans without a bachelor's degree. They argued the patterns fit a "cumulative disadvantage" hypothesis: erosion of economic opportunity for less-educated Americans led to deteriorating social and family structures, which in turn produced worsening health outcomes over the life course.

Their analysis situated the mortality crisis within deindustrialization, the decline of unions, fracturing family structures, and the opioid epidemic. The rising mortality was not simply attributable to opioid prescribing, though that was a significant factor. It reflected deeper economic and social deterioration among working-class Americans whose prospects had eroded over decades.

Later work published in 2023 provided further analysis of the widening gap in death rates between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans. A Brookings paper detailed how this education-based mortality gap had expanded across age groups and causes of death, extending well beyond "deaths of despair" to heart disease and other conditions. Their argument was direct: the U.S. economy was failing working-class people in ways that manifested directly in their health and longevity.

A 2025 paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology examined education's role in mortality divergence further. Case investigated whether the widening mortality gap between Americans with and without a four-year college degree could be explained by health-based selection—that is, whether healthier individuals are more likely to attend and complete college. The study, covering three decades of trends, contributed to ongoing debates about what actually links education and health outcomes.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Case and Deaton's research culminated in a book published by Princeton University Press in 2020. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism synthesized their academic findings for a general audience while offering broader arguments about American capitalism and the health crisis they had documented over the preceding five years. The book argued that failures of the American healthcare system, the power of pharmaceutical companies, the decline of stable employment for workers without college degrees, and the weakening of community institutions had combined to create conditions in which despair became endemic among large segments of the population, with self-destructive behaviors following as a consequence.

The Financial Times profiled Case as the book appeared, noting that she and Deaton had searched for an explanation after discovering rising death rates among white Americans, concluding that the answer lay in economic and social deterioration specific to the American context. The book reached economists, public health scholars, policymakers, and general readers. Case presented its findings at institutions including the London School of Economics, extending the conversation into international policy circles.

Personal Life

Anne Case is married to Angus Deaton, a British-American economist who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015 for his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare. Their personal and professional lives are closely intertwined; they have co-authored many of the papers and the book for which both are widely known. Following Deaton's knighthood in the 2016 New Year Honours, Case holds the courtesy title Lady Deaton by convention.

The couple have been open about the collaborative nature of their research partnership. Media commentary, including a 2015 New York Times article, examined how credit for joint research in economics is sometimes distributed unevenly along gender lines, with Case's contributions at times receiving less public recognition than those of her co-author.

Recognition

Case's contributions to economics and public health have earned significant honors. In 2020, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest distinctions available to American scientists and scholars.

Her 2015 paper with Angus Deaton on rising mortality among white non-Hispanic Americans received the Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, awarded annually to papers reflecting scientific excellence and originality.

Her Princeton faculty page lists additional awards accumulated over her career. Her work has been cited thousands of times in academic literature, as documented on her Google Scholar profile, placing her among the most frequently referenced scholars in health economics and the economics of mortality.

The IMF's 2024 Finance & Development profile of Case as "The Longevity Economist" further attested to her standing as a leading figure in the study of health, economics, and public policy.

Legacy

Anne Case's research, particularly her collaborative work with Angus Deaton on deaths of despair, has shaped academic research, public discourse, and policy debates in the United States and internationally. The concept of "deaths of despair" has entered common usage among economists, public health researchers, journalists, and policymakers as a framework for understanding the health crisis affecting less-educated Americans.

The 2015 PNAS paper is credited with drawing sustained attention to a mortality trend that demographers and public health officials had not fully registered. By documenting the reversal in life expectancy progress among a specific demographic group—middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans without a four-year college degree—Case and Deaton challenged the assumption that health improvements in wealthy countries would continue uniformly across all populations.

Their subsequent work linking the mortality crisis to economic dislocation, American healthcare failures, and eroding social institutions contributed to a broader reconsid