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 whose research at the intersection of health and economics has reshaped understanding of mortality patterns in the United States. Serving for decades as a professor at Princeton University, where she held the title of Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs before becoming emeritus, Case gained international prominence for her collaborative work with Deaton documenting a striking reversal in life expectancy trends among middle-aged white Americans without college degrees — a phenomenon the pair termed "deaths of despair." Their 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease were driving unprecedented increases in midlife mortality, a finding that challenged prevailing assumptions about health progress in wealthy nations and sparked broad public debate about the social and economic forces undermining the well-being of America's working class. Case's body of work extends across development economics, labor economics, and the economics of aging, with field research conducted in countries including South Africa. Her scholarship has been recognized through election to the National Academy of Sciences and through multiple academic prizes.

Early Life

Anne Catherine Case was born on July 27, 1958, in the United States. Publicly available biographical materials provide limited detail about her upbringing and family background. What is documented is that Case developed an early interest in economic questions relating to social welfare and public health, interests that would define her scholarly career. She pursued her higher education with a focus on economics, ultimately gravitating toward the rigorous empirical methods that would characterize her later research on health disparities and mortality.

Education

Case completed her doctoral studies in economics at Princeton University, earning a Ph.D. that positioned her within the university's tradition of applied microeconomic research. Her graduate training emphasized econometrics and the analysis of large-scale survey data, skills that proved foundational for her later investigations into the determinants of health and economic well-being across populations. Her curriculum vitae lists her educational background and early academic appointments in detail.

Career

Academic Appointments at Princeton

Case spent the bulk of her academic career at Princeton University, where 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. She held this position until her transition to emeritus status. At Princeton, Case taught courses in health economics, development economics, and public policy, and she supervised numerous doctoral students. Her presence at the university placed her within a community of economists working on applied empirical questions, including her eventual co-author and husband, Angus Deaton.

A profile published by the International Monetary Fund in its Finance & Development magazine described Case as "The Longevity Economist," reflecting the centrality of mortality and lifespan research to her identity as a scholar. The profile detailed her contributions to understanding how economic conditions shape health outcomes across the lifespan.

Development Economics and Health Research

Before her work on American mortality trends brought her to wide public attention, Case had built a substantial research record in development economics and health economics, with a particular focus on Southern Africa. Her publications, catalogued on her Princeton faculty page and on Google Scholar, span topics including the economic consequences of orphanhood in Africa, the effects of social pensions on household welfare, and the relationship between economic shocks and child health in developing countries.

This earlier work established Case's expertise in using microdata from household surveys to draw inferences about the causal relationships between economic resources, social circumstances, and health. Her research in South Africa, for instance, examined how the extension of social pension benefits to Black South Africans after the end of apartheid affected household composition, child nutrition, and school enrollment — studies that contributed to broader debates about the design of social safety nets in developing countries.

The "Deaths of Despair" Research

The research for which Case is most recognized began in the mid-2010s and centered on a discovery that she and Angus Deaton described as initially surprising even to themselves. In a paper published in November 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Case and Deaton documented that all-cause mortality among middle-aged white non-Hispanic Americans had been rising since 1999, reversing decades of decline. This 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 were striking because they ran counter to the long-established trend of declining mortality 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 were experiencing 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 also drawing attention to the dynamics of recognition in economics — observing that even accomplished female economists such as Case sometimes received less credit 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 paper for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, titled "Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century." In this follow-up, they deepened their analysis of the role of education in mortality divergence and examined not only deaths but also rising rates of morbidity — including chronic pain, mental distress, and difficulty with daily activities — among Americans without a bachelor's degree. They argued that the patterns they observed were consistent with a "cumulative disadvantage" hypothesis, in which the 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.

The Brookings paper situated the mortality crisis within the broader context of deindustrialization, the decline of unions, the fracturing of traditional family structures, and the opioid epidemic. Case and Deaton emphasized that the rising mortality was not simply a consequence of opioid prescribing, though that played a role, but reflected a deeper malaise among working-class Americans whose economic prospects had deteriorated over decades.

In subsequent work published in 2023, Case and Deaton provided further accounting for the widening gap in death rates between Americans with and without a bachelor's degree. A paper published through Brookings detailed how this education-based mortality gap had expanded across age groups and causes of death, extending beyond the "deaths of despair" categories to include heart disease and other conditions. They argued that the U.S. economy was failing working-class people in ways that manifested directly in their health and longevity.

A 2025 paper published in the American Journal of Epidemiology further examined the role of education in mortality divergence. Case, working from her Princeton affiliation, 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, the possibility that healthier individuals are more likely to attend and complete college. The study, which covered trends over three decades, contributed to ongoing debates about the causal mechanisms linking education and health.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Case and Deaton's research culminated in a book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, published by Princeton University Press in 2020. The book synthesized their academic findings for a general audience and offered a broader argument about the relationship between American capitalism and the health crisis they had documented. They contended that the failures of the American healthcare system, the power of pharmaceutical companies, the decline of good jobs for non-college-educated workers, and the weakening of community institutions had combined to create conditions in which despair — and the self-destructive behaviors it engenders — had become endemic among large segments of the population.

The Financial Times profiled Case in connection with the book's publication, noting that after discovering the rising death rates among white Americans, Case and Deaton had searched for a cause and concluded that the explanation lay in the intersection of economic and social deterioration specific to the American context. The book received attention from economists, public health scholars, policymakers, and the general media, and Case continued to present and discuss its findings at institutions including the London School of Economics.

Personal Life

Anne Case is married to Angus Deaton, a British-American economist who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015 for his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare. The couple's personal and professional lives have been closely intertwined, as they have co-authored many of the papers and the book for which both are known. Through her marriage to Deaton, who was knighted in 2016, Case holds the courtesy title Lady Deaton.

Case and Deaton have been open about the collaborative nature of their research partnership. The dynamics of their co-authorship attracted media commentary, including a 2015 New York Times article that examined how credit for joint research in economics is sometimes distributed unevenly along gender lines.

Recognition

Case's contributions to economics and public health have been recognized through several significant honors. In 2020, she was elected as a member of 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, an award given annually to papers that reflect scientific excellence and originality.

Her Princeton faculty page lists additional awards and honors received over the course of her career. Case's work has been cited thousands of times in the academic literature, as documented by her Google Scholar profile, making her one of the most frequently referenced scholars in the fields of health economics and the economics of mortality.

The IMF's profiling of Case as "The Longevity Economist" in its Finance & Development magazine in 2024 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 had a measurable impact on 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 that had been overlooked by demographers and public health officials. 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 segments of the population.

Their subsequent work linking the mortality crisis to economic dislocation, the failures of the American healthcare system, and the erosion of social institutions contributed to a broader reconsideration of the relationship between capitalism, inequality, and health. The argument advanced in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism — that the American economy had ceased to function for large portions of the working class — resonated with ongoing debates about inequality, the opioid epidemic, and the political discontent expressed in American elections during the 2010s and 2020s.

Case's more recent work on the education-based mortality gap has continued to push the research agenda forward, examining whether the divergence in life expectancy between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans can be attributed to selection effects or whether it reflects genuine causal pathways from economic disadvantage to poor health and premature death.

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