Can Unearned Income Make Us Fitter? Evidence from Lottery Wins

Joan Costa-Font and Mario Gyori ()
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Mario Gyori: London School of Economics

No 13903, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Although lower income is associated with overweight (and obesity), such an association is explained by a number of other confounding effects such as omitted variables (e.g., time preferences) explaining that income effect on overweight. We study the effect of unearned income shocks resulting from a lottery win (windfall income) on both overweight (alongside obesity and body mass index) distribution. We draw upon longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, a country where about half of a population plays the lottery. Our results suggest no evidence of contemporaneous effects of income on overweight, but a significant lagged effect. We find a reduction in overweight 12 months after a lottery win. A 1000-sterling win reduces overweight by 2-3 percentage points. Furthermore, we document a nonlinear effect up to 36 months after the lottery win, suggesting that small wins increase overweight and large wins reduce it. The effect of a lottery win varies depending on an individual's working hours and educational attainment. A lottery win among low education individuals decreases the risk of overweight.

Keywords: income; overweight; obesity; body mass index (BMI); windfall income; lottery wins (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lma, nep-ltv and nep-pub
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Published - published as 'Income Windfalls and Overweight Evidence from Lottery Wins' in: Empirical Economics, 2023, 64, 2005–2026

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Related works:
Journal Article: Income windfalls and overweight: evidence from lottery wins (2023)
Working Paper: Can Unearned Income Make Us Fitter? Evidence from Lottery Wins (2020)
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