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Objective. This study examines the degree to which a married individual's health habits and use of preventive medical care are influenced by his or her spouse's behaviors. Study Design. Using longitudinal data on individuals and their spouses, we examine changes over time in the health habits of each person as a function of changes in his or her spouse's health habits. Specifically, we analyze changes in smoking, drinking, exercising, cholesterol screening, and obtaining a flu shot. Data Source. This study uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of individuals born between 1931 and 1941 and their spouses. Beginning in 1992, 12,652 persons (age-eligible individuals as well as their spouses) from 7,702 households were surveyed about many aspects of their life, including health behaviors, use of preventive services, and disease diagnosis. Sample. The analytic sample includes 6,072 individuals who are married at the time of the initial HRS survey and who remain married and in the sample at the time of the 1996 and 2000 waves. Principal Findings. We consistently find that when one spouse improves his or her behavior, the other spouse is likely to do so as well. This is found across all the behaviors analyzed, and persists despite controlling for many other factors. Conclusions. Simultaneous changes occur in a number of health behaviors. This conclusion has prescriptive implications for developing interventions, treatments, and policies to improve health habits and for evaluating the impact of such measures.Key Words. Spouse, smoking, alcohol, exercise, preventive services Smoking, drinking, and obesity have all garnered much attention for their detrimental effects on health and other outcomes. Behaviors such as exercise and a healthy diet, in contrast, can have positive effects on health. Similarly, the use of preventive services, such as cholesterol screening and flu shots, can lead to additional years of life. A critical question is how to improve the health of the public by encouraging healthy decisions. This paper focuses on the role of the spouse in shaping individual's health habits and decisions to use r Health Research and Educational Trust

This paper examines the impact of job loss due to business closings on body mass index (BMI) and alcohol consumption. We suggest that the ambiguous findings in the extant literature may be due in part to unobserved heterogeneity in response and in part due to an overly broad measure of job loss that is partially endogenous (e.g. layoffs). We improve upon this literature by using: exogenously determined business closings, a sophisticated estimation approach (finite mixture models) to deal with complex heterogeneity, and national, longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study. For both alcohol consumption and BMI, we find evidence that individuals who are more likely to respond to job loss by increasing unhealthy behaviors are already in the problematic range for these behaviors before losing their jobs. These results suggest the health effects of job loss could be concentrated among “at risk” individuals and could lead to negative outcomes for the individuals, their families, and society at large.