Do Wealth Shocks Affect Health? New Evidence from the Housing Boom

Eleonora Fichera and John Gathergood

Health Economics, 2016, vol. 25, issue S2, 57-69

Abstract: We exploit large exogenous changes in housing wealth to examine the impact of wealth gains and losses on individual health. In UK household, panel data house price increases, which endow owners with greater wealth, lower the likelihood of home owners exhibiting a range of non‐chronic health conditions and improve their self‐assessed health with no effect on their psychological health. These effects are not transitory and persist over a 10‐year period. Using a range of fixed effects models, we provide robust evidence that these results are not biased by reverse causality or omitted factors. For owners' wealth gains affect labour supply and leisure choices indicating that house price increases allow individuals to reduce intensity of work with commensurate health benefits. © 2016 The Authors. Health Economics Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3431

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Wealth Shocks Affect Health? New Evidence from the Housing Boom (2015)
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:wly:hlthec:v:25:y:2016:i:s2:p:57-69

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.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().