Apouey Benedicte, Clark Andrew E
Paris School of Economics - CNRS, Paris, France.
Health Econ. 2015 May;24(5):516-38. doi: 10.1002/hec.3035. Epub 2014 Feb 18.
We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviours (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect of income on health, as the amount won by winners is largely exogenous. Positive income shocks have no significant effect on self-assessed overall health, but a significant positive effect on mental health. This result seems paradoxical on two levels. First, there is a well-known gradient in health status in cross-sectional data, and second, general health should partly reflect mental health, so that we may expect both variables to move in the same direction. We propose a solution to the first apparent paradox by underlining the endogeneity of income. For the second, we show that lottery winnings are also associated with more smoking and social drinking. General health will reflect both mental health and the effect of these behaviours and so may not improve following a positive income shock.
总体健康状况、心理健康、身体健康问题以及健康行为（饮酒和吸烟）。彩票中奖使我们能够就收入对健康的影响做出因果陈述，因为中奖者的中奖金额在很大程度上是外生的。正向收入冲击对自我评估的总体健康没有显著影响，但对心理健康有显著的正向影响。这一结果在两个层面上似乎自相矛盾。首先，在横截面数据中，健康状况存在一个众所周知的梯度；其次，总体健康应部分反映心理健康，因此我们可能预期这两个变量会朝着相同方向变化。我们通过强调收入的内生性来为第一个明显的矛盾提出一个解决方案。对于第二个矛盾，我们表明彩票中奖也与更多吸烟和社交饮酒有关。总体健康将反映心理健康以及这些行为的影响，因此在正向收入冲击后可能不会改善。
