This article The purpose of this paper is to introduce b, a simply typed -calculus that supports type-based recursive definitions. Although heavily inspired from previous work by Giménez (Giménez 1998) and closely related to recent work by Amadio and Coupet (Amadio and Coupet-Grimal 1998), the technical machinery behind our system puts a slightly different emphasis on the interpretation of types. More precisely, we formalize the notion of type-based termination using a restricted form of type dependency (a.k.a. indexed types), as popularized by (Xi and Pfenning 1998; Xi and Pfenning 1999). This leads to a simple and intuitive system which is robust under several extensions, such as mutually inductive datatypes and mutually recursive function definitions; however, such extensions are not treated in the paper