Too Healthy to Fall Sick? Longevity Expectations and Protective Health Behaviours during the First Wave of COVID-19

Martina Celidoni, Joan Costa-Font and Luca Salmasi
Additional contact information
Martina Celidoni: University of Padova

No 15493, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Longevity expectations (LE) are subjective assessments of future health status that can influence a number of individual health protective decisions. This is especially true during a pandemic such as COVID-19, as the risk of ill health depends more than ever on such protective decisions. This paper exploits differences in LE to examine the causal effect of LE on protective health behaviours and a number of decisions around access to health care, using data from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe. We draw on an instrumental variable strategy exploiting individual level information on parental age at death. Consistent with the too healthy to be sick hypothesis, we find that individuals with higher expected longevity are more likely to engage in protective behaviours, and are less likely to forgo medical treatment. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in expected longevity increases the probability to comply always with social distancing by 0.6%, to meet people less often by 0.4% and decreases the probability to forgo any medical treatment by 0.6%. Our estimates vary depending on the availability of health care, as well as individuals' gender and pre-existing health conditions.

Keywords: COVID-19; instrumental variables; Europe; health capital; health behaviours; forgone medical treatment; private information; longevity expectations; SHARE (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation , 2022, 202, 733 - 745

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15493.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Too Healthy to Fall Sick? Longevity Expectations and Protective Health Behaviours during the First Wave of COVID-19 (2022)
Working Paper: Too Healthy to Fall Sick? Longevity Expectations and Protective Health Behaviours during the First Wave of Covid-19 (2022)
Working Paper: Too healthy to fall sick? Longevity expectations and protective health behaviours during the first wave of COVID-19 (2022)
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:iza:izadps:dp15493

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().