Family Health Behaviors

Itzik Fadlon and Torben Nielsen ()

EPRU Working Paper Series from Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies how health behaviors and investments are shaped through intra- and inter-generational family spillovers. Specffically, leveraging administrative healthcare data, we identify the effects of health shocks to individuals on their family members' consumption of preventive care and utilization indicative of health-related behaviors. Our identification strategy relies on the timing of shocks by constructing counterfactuals to affected households using households that experience the same shock but a few years in the future. We find that spouses and adult children immediately increase their health investments and improve their health behaviors in response to family shocks, and that these effects are both significant and persistent for at least several years. Notably, we find that these spillover effects in consumption of healthcare are far-reaching and cascade to siblings, stepchildren, sons and daughters in-law, and even "close" coworkers. Using different strategies we show that while a variety of mechanisms seem to be at play, including learning new information about one's own health, there is consistent evidence in support of salience as a major operative explanation, even when the family shock was likely uninformative. Our results have implications for models of health behaviors, by underscoring the importance of one's family and social network in their determination, and are potentially informative for policies that aim to improve population health.

Keywords: Health Behaviors; Health Shocks; Spillovers; Family; Coworkers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D83 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://web.econ.ku.dk/eprn_epru/Workings_Papers/WP-2017-05.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://web.econ.ku.dk/eprn_epru/Workings_Papers/WP-2017-05.pdf [301 Moved permanently]--> https://web.econ.ku.dk/eprn_epru/Workings_Papers/WP-2017-05.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Family Health Behaviors (2019)
Working Paper: Family Health Behaviors (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:epruwp:17-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EPRU Working Paper Series from Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics �ster Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Hoffmann ().