title: Wealth and Health Behavior: Testing the Concept of a Health Cost.
abstract: Wealthier individuals engage in healthier behavior. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by exploiting both inheritances and lottery winnings to test a theory of health behavior. We distinguish between the direct monetary cost and the indirect health cost (value of health lost) of unhealthy consumption. The health cost increases with wealth and the degree of unhealthiness, leading wealthier individuals to consume more healthy and moderately unhealthy, but fewer severely unhealthy goods. The empirical evidence presented suggests that differences in health costs may indeed partially explain behavioral differences, and ultimately health outcomes, between wealth groups.
authors.affiliation: hvankippersluis@ese.eur.nl , +31 10 4088837. Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Tinbergen Institute, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Hans
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: van Kippersluis
authors.affiliation: galama@usc.edu , University of Southern California, Dornsife College Center for Economic and Social Research, 12015 Waterfront Drive Playa Vista, CA 90094-2536, USA, and RAND Corporation, USA.
authors.forename: Titus J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Galama
keywords: health behavior; health capital; unhealthy consumption; wealth