Income windfalls and overweight: evidence from lottery wins

Joan Costa-Font and Mario Györi
Additional contact information
Mario Györi: London School of Economics and Political Science

Empirical Economics, 2023, vol. 64, issue 5, No 1, 2005-2026

Abstract: Abstract We examine the impact of an income windfall (from a lottery win) on an individual's overweight and Body Mass Index (BMI). We use longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, where a large proportion of the population plays the lottery, and retrieve income effect estimates using time and individual specific fixed effects alongside a set of relevant controls. Although our findings suggest any income windfall may lead to a contemporaneous increase in overweight, we document evidence that a £1,000 win reduces the probability of overweight in the range by up to 3 percentual points 12 months after the lottery win. Estimates are heterogeneous across working hours and educational attainment. A £1000 lottery win reduces the risk of overweight among low educated individuals by 4.5–5 percentual points (pp)12 months after the lottery win.

Keywords: Obesity; Overweight; Income; Windfall income; Lottery wins; Body mass index (BMI) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-022-02312-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Income windfalls and overweight: evidence from lottery wins (2023)
Working Paper: Can Unearned Income Make Us Fitter? Evidence from Lottery Wins (2020)
Working Paper: Can Unearned Income Make Us Fitter? Evidence from Lottery Wins (2020)
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:spr:empeco:v:64:y:2023:i:5:d:10.1007_s00181-022-02312-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-022-02312-7

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().