A vast literature has established a strong positive association of income with health status and a negative association … with mortality. This paper studies the effects of income on health and mortality, using only the part of income variation … that is due to a truly exogenous factor: the monetary lottery prizes of individuals. The findings are that higher income …

Although lower income is associated with overweight (and obesity), such an association is explained by a number of … other confounding effects such as omitted variables (e.g., time preferences) explaining that income effect on overweight. We … study the effect of unearned income shocks resulting from a lottery win (windfall income) on both overweight (alongside …