Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players

Arbeitspapier

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors such as the number of lottery tickets conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large the cross-sectional gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children's health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children's outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IFN Working Paper ; No. 1060

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡ ; Health: General ; Health Behavior ; Health and Inequality ; Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
• Subject: Health ; Mortality ; Healthcare ; Child health ; Child development ; Human capital ; Wealth ; Income ; Lotteries

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Cesarini, David ; Lindqvist, Erik ; Östling, Robert ; Wallace, Björn
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)
• (where): Stockholm
• (when): 2015

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/109087
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET