Working Paper: NBER ID: w24042
Authors: Itzik Fadlon; Torben Heien Nielsen
Abstract: This paper studies how health behaviors and investments are shaped through family spillovers. Leveraging administrative healthcare data, we identify the effects of health shocks to individuals on their family members' consumption of preventive care and health-related behaviors. Our identification strategy utilizes the timing of shocks to construct counterfactuals for affected households using households that experience the same shock but a few years in the future. We find that spouses and adult children immediately increase their health investments and improve their health behaviors in response to family shocks, and that these effects are both significant and persistent. Notably, we show that these spillover effects are far-reaching and cascade to siblings, stepchildren, sons and daughters in-law, and even “close” coworkers. While some responses are consistent with learning new information about one's own health, evidence from cases where shocks are likely uninformative points to salience as a major operative explanation. Our results underscore the importance of one's family and social network for models of health behaviors and have potential implications for policies that aim to improve population health.
Keywords: health behaviors; family spillovers; preventive care; health shocks
JEL Codes: D1; D83; I12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| health shock (I12) | spouse's health investments increase (J12) |
| health shock (I12) | younger adult children's health investments increase (J13) |
| health shock (I12) | older adult children's health investments increase (J13) |
| health shock (I12) | siblings' health investments increase (J13) |
| health shock (I12) | stepchildren's health investments increase (J13) |
| health shock (I12) | close coworkers' health investments increase (J32) |
| health shock (I12) | learning about health risks (I10) |
| health shock (I12) | salience of health condition (I12) |