American Economic Review Vol. 109 No. 9 2019

Family Health Behaviors

Itzik Fadlon¹; Torben Heien Nielsen²

¹ Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0508, La Jolla, CA 92093, and NBER (email: ) · ² Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5 Building 26, DK-1353, Copenhagen K, and CEBI (email: )

Abstract

We study how health behaviors are shaped through family spillovers. We leverage administrative data to identify the effects of health shocks on family members’ consumption of preventive care and health-related behaviors, constructing counterfactuals for affected households using households that experience the same shock but a few years in the future. Spouses and adult children immediately improve their health behaviors and their responses are both significant and persistent. These spillovers are far-reaching as they cascade even to coworkers. While some responses are consistent with learning information about one’s own health, the evidence points to salience as a major operative explanation.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20171993

Volume

109

Issue

9

Pages

3162-3191

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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