Health and Wealth of Nations

This book theoretically and empirically examines the relationship between health and wealth. We first model the endogenous interactions between life expectancy and income by modifying a standard overlapping generation model to allow individuals to directly choose their own longevity. The second portion of the book is empirical. We show that income has statistically significant effects on various proxies for health. The results are robust to different ways of controlling for the endogeneity of income: both instrumental variable estimation with external instruments and also generalized method of moments estimation when internal instruments are applied. We also directly test for the causal relationship between income and various proxies for health using three panel Granger causality tests.