Too healthy to fall sick? Longevity expectations and protective health behaviours during the first wave of COVID-19

Martina Celidoni, Joan Costa-Font and Luca Salmasi

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Longevity expectations (LE) are subjective assessments of future health status that can influence a number of individual health protective decisions. This is especially true during a pandemic such as COVID-19, as the risk of ill health depends more than ever on such protective decisions. This paper examines the causal effect of LE on some protective health behaviors and a number of decisions regarding forgoing health care using individual differences in LE. We use data from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe, and we draw on an instrumental variable strategy exploiting individual level information on parental age at death. Consistent with the too healthy to be sick hypothesis, we find that individuals, exhibiting higher expected longevity, are more likely to engage in protective behaviours, and are less likely to forgo medical treatment. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in LE increases the probability to comply always with social distancing by 0.6%, to meet people less often by 0.4% and decreases the probability to forgo any medical treatment by 0.6%. Our estimates vary depending on supply side restrictions influencing the availability of health care, as well as individual characteristics such as their gender and the presence of pre-existing health conditions.

Keywords: coronavirus; Covid-19; longevity expectations; private information; health behaviours; foregone medical treatment; health capital; SHARE; Europe; instrumental variables; forgone medical treatment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2022-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1, October, 2022, 202, pp. 733 - 745. ISSN: 0167-2681

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115979/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Too Healthy to Fall Sick? Longevity Expectations and Protective Health Behaviours during the First Wave of COVID-19 (2022)
Working Paper: Too Healthy to Fall Sick? Longevity Expectations and Protective Health Behaviours during the First Wave of Covid-19 (2022)
Working Paper: Too Healthy to Fall Sick? Longevity Expectations and Protective Health Behaviours during the First Wave of COVID-19 (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:115979

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