This paper reports the first test of how exogenous health shocks impact people's longevity expectations. The analysis exploits the panel structure of the Health and Retirement Study and tests whether smokers, former smokers and those who never smoked react differently to serious, smoking related...

Note: The following text is a description of the paper and not the text of the abstract as printed in the Journal of Health Economics. Placing dollar values on human health has long been a controversial aspect of policy analysis and remains difficult, given the relatively small number of...