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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Why The Rich Drink More But Smoke Less: The Impact Of Wealth On Health Behaviors, Hans Van Kippersluis, Titus Galama
Why The Rich Drink More But Smoke Less: The Impact Of Wealth On Health Behaviors, Hans Van Kippersluis, Titus Galama
Titus Galama
Wealthier individuals engage in healthier behavior. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by developing a theory of health behavior, and exploiting both lottery winnings and inheritances to test the theory. We distinguish between the direct monetary cost and the indirect health cost (value of health lost) of unhealthy consumption. The health cost increases with wealth and the degree of unhealthiness, leading wealthier individuals to consume more healthy and moderately unhealthy, but fewer severely unhealthy goods. The empirical evidence presented suggests that differences in health costs may indeed provide an explanation for behavioral differences, and ultimately health outcomes, between wealth …
A Theory Of Socioeconomic Disparities In Health, Titus Galama
A Theory Of Socioeconomic Disparities In Health, Titus Galama
Titus Galama
Detailed understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the substantial socioeconomic disparities in health is necessary to design policies effective in reducing those disparities. This requires a unifying theory of socioeconomic status and health, which is currently absent. This thesis in economics aims to develop, in several steps, a theoretical framework of disparities in health by socioeconomic status over the life cycle, using economic principles and founded in health capital theory. The first part of this thesis addresses several serious technical issues with life-cycle models of health, medical care, and socioeconomic status. The second part presents the theoretical framework.
A Contribution To Health Capital Theory, Titus Galama
A Contribution To Health Capital Theory, Titus Galama
Titus Galama
I present a theory of the demand for health, health investment and longevity, building on the human capital framework for health and addressing limitations of existing models. I predict a negative correlation between health investment and health, that the health of wealthy and educated individuals declines more slowly and that they live longer, that current health status is a function of the initial level of health and the histories of prior health investments made, that health investment rapidly increases near the end of life and that length of life is finite as a result of limited life-time resources (the budget …
A Theory Of Socioeconomic Disparities In Health Over The Life Cycle, Titus Galama, Hans Van Kippersluis
A Theory Of Socioeconomic Disparities In Health Over The Life Cycle, Titus Galama, Hans Van Kippersluis
Titus Galama
Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that incorporates multiple mechanisms explaining (jointly) a large part of the observed disparities in health by SES. In our model, lifestyle factors, working conditions, retirement, living conditions and curative care are mechanisms through which SES, health and mortality are related. Our model predicts a widening and possibly a subsequent narrowing with age of the gradient in health by SES.
Grossman’S Missing Health Threshold, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn
Grossman’S Missing Health Threshold, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn
Titus Galama
We present a generalized solution to Grossman’s model of health capital (1972), relaxing the widely used assumption that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an “optimal” level without adjustment costs. The Grossman model then predicts the existence of a health threshold above which individuals do not demand medical care. Our generalized solution addresses a significant criticism: the model’s prediction that health and medical care are positively related is consistently rejected by the data. We suggest structural and reduced form equations to test our generalized solution and contrast the predictions of the model with the empirical literature.
Grossman's Health Threshold And Retirement, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn, Raquel Fonseca, Pierre-Carl Michaud
Grossman's Health Threshold And Retirement, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn, Raquel Fonseca, Pierre-Carl Michaud
Titus Galama
We formulate a stylized structural model of health, wealth accumulation and retirement decisions building on the human capital framework of health provided by Grossman. We explicitly assume a functional form of the utility function and carefully account for initial conditions, which allow us to derive analytic solutions for the time paths of consumption, health, health investment, savings and retirement. We argue that the Grossman literature has been unnecessarily restrictive in assuming that health is always at Grossman’s “optimal” health level. Exploring the properties of corner solutions we find that advances in population health (health capital) can explain the paradox that …