We integrate time-inconsistent decision making due to hyperbolic discounting into a gerontologically founded life cycle model with endogenous aging and longevity. Individuals can slow down aging and postpone death by health investments and by reducing unhealthy consumption, conceptualized as...

We investigate two parallel school reforms in Sweden to assess the long-run health effects of education. One reform only increased years of schooling, while the other increased years of schooling but also removed tracking leading to a more mixed socioeconomic peer group. By differencing the...

Aging humans adapt to their worsening state of health and old people are usually happier than estimated by young individuals. In this paper we investigate how adaptation to a deteriorating state of health affects health spending, life expectancy, and the value of life. We set up a a life cycle...

Lifetime financial-, work- and health-related decisions made by agents are intertwined with one another. Understanding how these decisions are made is essential to gauge if saving in financial, retirement and human assets is adequate or not. This paper numerically solves, simulates, and...

Near the end of life, health declines, mortality risk increases and curative is replaced by uninsured long-term care, accelerating the fall in wealth. Whereas standard explanations emphasize inevitable aging processes, we propose a com- plementary closing down the shop justification where...

It has been argued that hyperbolic discounting of future gains and losses leads to time-inconsistent behavior and thereby, in the context of health economics, not enough investment in health and too much indulgence of unhealthy consumption. Here, we challenge this view. We set up a life-cycle...

Married people live longer than singles but how much of the longevity differential is causal and what the particular mechanisms are is not fully understood. In this paper we propose a new approach, based on counterfactual computational experiments, in order to asses how much of the marriage gap...

The present paper provides new evidence that hospital delivery can significantly lower child mortality risks, especially among vulnerable young adolescent mothers in Bangladesh. We exploit the exogenous variation in community's access to local health facilities (both traditional and modern)...

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large,virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors - such as the number...

This paper provides a closed-form solution for the health capital model of health demand. The results are exploited in order to prove analytically the comparative dynamics of the model. Results are derived for the so called pure investment model, the pure consumption model and a combination of...