We conduct a large-scale economics experiment paired with a survey to examine the association between individual risk preference and health-related behaviors among adults aged 18-87 years. Risk preference is measured by the lottery choice experiment designed by Holt and Laury [Holt, C.A., Laury, S.K., 2002. Risk aversion and incentive effects. The American Economic Review 92(5), 1644-1655]. Controlling for subject demographic and economic characteristics, we find that risk aversion is negatively and significantly associated with cigarette smoking, heavy drinking, being overweight or obese, and seat belt non-use. In additional specifications, we find that risk aversion is negatively and significantly associated with the likelihood a subject engaged in any of five risky behaviors and the number of risky behaviors reported.

Abstract:Several recent studies have reported a robust association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes across countries and across U.S. states. However, most of these studies examine only a single cross-section of data and employ few (or even no) control variables. We examine the relation between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes across thirty countries over a four decade span and across 48 U.S. states over five decades. We find little support for claims that there exists a robust association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes across either countries or states.

Do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? We use exogenous variation in the interview dates of the 2008 Health and Retirement Study to assess the impact of large wealth losses on mental health among older U.S. adults. We compare cross-wave changes in wealth and mental health for respondents interviewed before and after the October 2008 stock market crash. We find that the crash reduced wealth and increased feelings of depression and use of antidepressant drugs, and that these effects were largest among respondents with high levels of stock holdings prior to the crash. These results suggest that sudden wealth losses cause immediate declines in subjective measures of mental health. However, we find no evidence that wealth losses lead to increases in clinically-validated measures of depressive symptoms or indicators of depression.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. ABSTRACT Several recent studies have identified an association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes; this has been taken to be evidence that inequality is detrimental to individual health. We use data from the 1995-99 March Current Population Survey to examine the effect of income inequality on individual health status for both the general population and those individuals in poverty. We find no consistent association between income inequality and individual health status. Our results contradict recent claims that the psychosocial effects of income inequality have dramatic consequences for individual health outcomes.

Recent studies report that economic inequality is associated with reduced government expenditures on social programs. Several prominent social scientists, including Putnam [2000], attribute this relationship to the detrimental "psychosocial effects" of group heterogeneity on cooperation. We test the hypothesis that inequality within a group reduces individual contributions in a canonical public goods experiment. Unlike previous examinations of inequality and public good provision, our design introduces inequality by manipulating the levels and distributions of fixed payments given to subjects for participating in the experiment. When made salient through public information about each individual's standing within the group, inequality in the distribution of fixed payments reduces contributions to the public good for all group members.

We examine the stability of risk preference within subjects by comparing measures obtained from two elicitation methods, an economics experiment with real monetary rewards and a survey with questions on hypothetical gambles. The survey questions have been validated by numerous empirical studies of investment, insurance demand, smoking and alcohol use, and recent studies have shown the experimental measure is associated with several real-world risky behaviors. For the majority of subjects, we find that risk preferences are not stable across elicitation methods. In interval regression models subjects' risk preference classifications from survey questions on job-based gambles are not associated with risk preference estimates from the experiment. However, we find that risk classifications from inheritance-based gambles are significantly associated with the experimental measure. We identify some subjects for whom risk preference estimates are more strongly correlated across elicitation methods, suggesting that unobserved subject traits like comprehension or effort influence risk preference stability.Keywords Risk preferences . Laboratory experiment . Survey JEL Classification C9 . D8Do individuals respond to risk in a consistent manner? A growing literature has examined whether individual-level risk preference varies with incentives (e.g., Camerer and Hogarth 1999), implementation mode (e.g., von Gaudecker et al. 2008), or over time (e.g., Andersen et al. 2008. These studies raise intriguing questions for economic theories of choice under uncertainty and public policies based on assumptions about the public's degree of risk. The present study examines the consistency of risk preference measures by comparing subject choices in the Holt

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Previous studies have shown that adolescent religious participation is negatively associated with risky health behaviors such as cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and illicit drug use. One explanation for these findings is that religion directly reduces risky behaviors because churches provide youths with moral guidance or with strong social networks that reinforce social norms. An alternative explanation is that both religious participation and risky health behaviors are driven by some common unobserved individual trait. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and implement an instrumental variables approach to identify the effect of religious participation on smoking, binge drinking, and marijuana use. Following Gruber (2005), we use a county-level measure of religious market density as an instrument. We find that religious market density has a strong positive association with adolescent religious participation, but not with secular measures of social capital. Upon accounting for unobserved heterogeneity, we find that religious participation continues to have a significant negative effect on illicit drug use. On the contrary, the estimated effects of attendance in instrumental variables models of binge drinking and smoking are statistically imprecise.