Is it Money or Marriage that Keeps People Alive?

Andrew Oswald and Jonathan Gardner

No 161, Royal Economic Society Annual Conference 2003 from Royal Economic Society

Abstract: It is believed that the length of a person's life depends on a mixture of economic and social factors. Yet the relative importance of these is still debated. We provide evidence in this paper that marriage has a much more important (positive) effect on longevity than high income does. For men, it almost exactly offsets the large negative effect of smoking. Economics, however, plays little or no role. After controlling for health at the start of the 1990s, we find no reliable evidence that income affects the probability of death over the subsequent decade.

Keywords: mortality; health; income; marriage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-06-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecj:ac2003:161

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