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
Website	https://scholar.princeton.edu/accase/home

Anne Catherine Case (born July 27, 1958), known professionally as Anne Case and styled as Lady Deaton through her marriage to Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, is an American economist. Her research sits at the intersection of health and economics, and it's fundamentally reshaped how we understand mortality patterns in the United States. For decades at Princeton University, where she held the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs title before becoming emeritus, Case rose to international prominence through collaborative work with Deaton. Together, they documented something shocking: a reversal in life expectancy trends among middle-aged white Americans without college degrees. They called it "deaths of despair."

Their 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences made waves. Suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease were driving unprecedented increases in midlife mortality. That challenged everything economists thought they knew about health progress in wealthy nations, and it sparked intense 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. She's conducted field research in South Africa and other countries. The National Academy of Sciences elected her, and she's won multiple academic prizes for her contributions.

Early Life

Anne Catherine Case was born on July 27, 1958, in the United States. Public records don't say much about her upbringing or family background, but what's clear is that she developed early interests in economic questions about social welfare and public health. Those interests would define everything she did as a scholar. She pursued economics in her higher education, eventually gravitating toward the rigorous empirical methods that would characterize her later investigations into health disparities and mortality.

Education

She 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. Those skills became foundational for her later investigations into what determines health and economic well-being across populations. Her curriculum vitae lists the details of her education and early academic appointments.

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." That title reflects 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, catalogued on her Princeton faculty page and Google Scholar, 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 began in the mid-2010s. She and Angus Deaton discovered something that surprised them initially. In November 2015, they published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting a startling fact: all-cause mortality among middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans had been rising since 1999. This reversed decades of 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 everything. For decades, mortality had fallen at every age in the United States and in other wealthy nations. But 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 while drawing attention to how credit for joint research in economics is distributed unevenly along gender lines. Even accomplished female economists such as Case sometimes received less recognition for joint 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 along with 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.

They situated the mortality crisis within deindustrialization, the decline of unions, fracturing family structures, and the opioid epidemic. The rising mortality wasn't simply about opioid prescribing, though that mattered. It reflected deeper malaise among working-class Americans whose economic prospects had deteriorated 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 stark: 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. Could healthier individuals be 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.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Their research culminated in a book. Princeton University Press published Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism in 2020, synthesizing their academic findings for a general audience while offering broader arguments about American capitalism and the health crisis they'd documented. The failures of the American healthcare system, the power of pharmaceutical companies, the decline of good jobs for non-college-educated workers, and weakening community institutions had combined to create conditions in which despair became endemic among large segments of the population. Self-destructive behaviors followed.

The Financial Times profiled Case as the book came out. She and Deaton had searched for a cause after discovering rising death rates among white Americans, concluding that the explanation lay in economic and social deterioration specific to the American context. The book reached economists, public health scholars, policymakers, and the general media. Case continued presenting its findings at institutions including the London School of Economics.

Personal Life

Anne Case is married to Angus Deaton, a British-American economist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015 for his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare. Their personal and professional lives are deeply intertwined. They've co-authored many of the papers and the book both are known for. Through marriage to Deaton, who was knighted in 2016, Case holds the courtesy title Lady Deaton.

The couple have been open about their research partnership's collaborative nature. Media commentary, including a 2015 New York Times article, examined how credit for joint research in economics is sometimes distributed unevenly along gender lines.

Recognition

Case's contributions to economics and public health 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 over her career. Her work has been cited thousands of times in academic literature, as shown by her Google Scholar profile. She's 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 studying health, economics, and public policy.

Legacy

Anne Case's research, particularly with Angus Deaton on deaths of despair, has measurably 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 attention to a mortality trend demographers and public health officials had overlooked. By documenting the reversal in life expectancy progress among a specific demographic group, 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 broader reconsideration of the relationship between capitalism, inequality, and health. The argument in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism resonated widely: the American economy had ceased to function for large portions of the working class. That message aligned with ongoing debates about inequality, the opioid epidemic, and the political discontent expressed in American elections during the 2010s and 2020s.

Recent work on the education-based mortality gap has continued advancing the research agenda. Case's investigations examine whether divergence in life expectancy between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans stems from selection effects or reflects genuine causal pathways from economic disadvantage to poor health and premature death.

As an economist whose research bridges economics, demography, and public health, Case has helped establish health economics as a field with direct relevance to some of the most pressing social challenges in contemporary America.