 Winning Big but Feeling no Better? The Effect of Lottery Prizes on Physical and Mental HealthBénédicte Apouey and Andrew Clark Health Economics, 2015, vol. 24, issue 5, 516-538 Abstract: 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. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Date: 2015 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:24:y:2015:i:5:p:516-538 Access Statistics for this article Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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