Education is strongly associated with better health and longer lives. However, the extent to which education causes health and longevity is widely debated. We develop a human capital framework to structure the interpretation of the empirical evidence. We then review evidence on the causal...

This paper presents a unified theory of human capital with both health capital and, what we term, skill capital endogenously determined within the model. By considering joint investment in health capital and in skill capital, the model highlights similarities and differences in these two...

Higher educated individuals are healthier and live longer than their lower educated peers. One reason is that lower educated individuals engage more often in unhealthy behaviors, including consumption of a poor diet, but it is not clear why they do so. In this paper, we design a Discrete Choice...

Social interactions are widely recognized to play an important role in smoking initiation among adolescents. In this paper we hypothesize that individual with `stronger' personalities (i.e. emotionally stable, conscientious individuals) are better able to resist peer pressure in the uptake of...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between 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. Motivated by the observation that medical care explains...

We present a theory of human capital, with its two most essential components, health capital and, what we term, skill capital, endogenously determined within the model. Using the theory, and a calibrated version of it, we uncover and highlight an important economic mechanism driving...

This chapter will explore what economic theory can offer in terms of improving our understanding of the potential causes of health inequalities over the life course. We use the model by Galama and Van Kippersluis (2019), which is based on the seminal health-capital theory of Grossman (1972), to...

Economists and social scientists have debated the relative importance of nature (one’s genes) and nurture (one’s environment) for decades, if not centuries. This debate can now be informed by the ready availability of genetic data in a growing number of social science datasets. This paper...

We present a theory of the relation between health and retirement that generates testable predictions regarding the interaction of health, wealth and financial incentives in retirement decisions. The theory predicts (i) that wealthier individuals (compared to poorer individuals) are more likely...