"We estimate how the marginal utility of consumption varies with health. To do so, we develop a simple model in which the impact of health on the marginal utility of consumption can be estimated from data on permanent income, health, and utility proxies. We estimate the model using the Health...

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

We study socially vs. individually optimal lifecycle allocations of consumption and health care, when individual health expenditure curbs own mortality but also has a spillover effect on other persons' survival. Such spillovers arise, for instance, when health care activity at aggregate level...