The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the impor-tance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant changes in where people work, eat and socialise. We use novel data on the food and non-alcoholic drink purchases from stores, takeaways, restaurants and other outlets to quantify the impact of the pandemic on the diets of a large, representative panel...

This paper studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomes - hospitalization and mortality rates - using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow us to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health...

This paper studies the short-term impact of public smoking bans on hospitalizations in Germany. It exploits the staggered implementation of smoking bans over time and across the 16 federal states along with the universe of hospitalizations from 2000-2008 and daily county-level weather and...

While consumer screening of nutritional information as well as general health concerns have been on the rise, whether such concerns are reflected in purchasing behavior is not quite as certain. We postulate this disconnect between health concerns (more specifically concerns with fat, salt and...

Does media exposure affect health behaviours? And how? We exploit the idiosyncratic switchover to digital television across Italian regions which exogenously increased the number of free view national channels and we link this to high-frequency data on the supply of food-related contents on the...

This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...

When some healthy foods are temporarily subsidized, how does that affect diet and how long does the impact last? I study the U.S. Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which gives vouchers for healthy foods. Using household-level scanner data and exploiting a...

This paper re-examines the effects of breastfeeding on long term educational outcomes using longitudinal data on siblings. While family fixed effects allow controls for all shared family factors, these estimators are sensitive to compensating or reinforcing behaviors by parents. These biases may...

OBJECTIVE: Most research on the impact of childhood distress within family focuses on the pathological damage caused to the distressed child. While the pathogenic paradigm focuses on why and how illness occurs, the salutogenic paradigm focuses on the origins and development of health. This...