Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players*

By David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, Björn Wallace. 2016

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large as the cross-sectional wealth-mortality gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children's health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets, causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth-mortality gradients, nor of the observed relationships between child-developmental outcomes and household income.

Subfields: Accounting, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29488131c7cd5ceead7e243e5b812bf73123180b

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Citations in the corpus

Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms (2020, background): “Further suggestive evidence for uncertainty as a mechanism comes from the small or zero effect of wealth shocks on mental health in countries with generous and comprehensive systems of social insurance, such as Sweden ( 34 , 35 ).”
The Effect of Wealth on Individual and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from Swedish Lotteries (2017, background): “For a detailed description of how the lottery data were processed and quality controlled, see sections III–VI of Cesarini et al. (2015).”
THE SHORT-TERM IMPACT OF UNCONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFERS TO THE POOR: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM KENYA (2016, unknown): “…et al. 2011; Rosero and Oosterbeek 2011; Devoto et al. 2012; Finkelstein et al. 2012; Baird, De Hoop, and Özler 2013; Bandiera et al. 2013; Ghosal et al. 2013; Mendolia 2014; Banerjee et al. 2015a; Cesarini et al. 2016), some studies find little effect (Paxson and Schady 2010; Kuhn et al. 2011).”
Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being (2018, unknown): “The Survey Population was drawn from a large administrative sample of lottery participants we have used in several previous studies on the impact of wealth on register-based outcomes such as health, mortality and children’s outcomes (Cesarini et al. 2016), labor supply (Cesarini et al.”