Estimating the Effect of Income on Health and Mortality Using Lottery Prizes as an Exogenous Source of Variation in Income

By Mikael Lindahl. The Journal of human resources, 2005

389 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A vast literature has established a strong positive relation between income and health status and a negative relation with mortality. This paper studies the effects of income on health and mortality, using only the part of income variation due to a truly exogenous factor: monetary lottery prizes of individuals. The findings are that higher income causally generates good health and that this effect is of a similar magnitude as when traditional estimation techniques are used. A 10 percent income increase improves health by about 4–5 percent of a standard deviation.

Subfields: Accounting, General Health Professions, Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a17b4aa5b8fcd915d30dad7e5bfb04ac8746025c

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Citations in the corpus

Wealth Shocks and Health Outcomes: Evidence from Stock Market Fluctuations (2016, neutral): “4 Lindahl (2005), Gardner and Oswald (2007), Apouey and Clark (2015), and Cesarini et al.”
The Health Implications of Social Pensions: Evidence from China's New Rural Pension Scheme (2016, methodology): “Consistent with Frijters et al. (2005) and Lindahl (2005), several recent studies on the United States find a small positive effect of wealth on health for the full sample (Meer et al., 2003), but no effect for couples aged 51–61 (Michaud and van Soest, 2008), or for the elderly aged 70 and above…”
Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players* (2016, background): “Three previous studies of lottery players’ health report statistically significant positive effects on mental health (Lindahl 2005; Gardner and Oswald 2007; Apouey and Clark 2015).”
Direct and indirect treatment effects–causal chains and mediation analysis with instrumental variables (2014, background): “(Similar exogenous variations in income were also exploited in Lindahl (2005) and Gardner and Oswald (2007).)”
Valuation Techniques for Social Cost-Benefit Analysis: (2011, background): “Those studies that use instruments for income find that income has a positive effect on life satisfaction (eg, lottery wins (Gardner and Oswald, 2007; Lindahl, 2002); exogenous pay increases for East Germans after German re-unification (Frijters et al., 2004)).”
Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being (2018, methodology): “Compared to the reweighted representative sample, players are substantially more likely to be born in Sweden (92.4% versus 83.8%).”