Why Do Entrepreneurs Have Higher Longevity Expectancies?

The health and lifespan of entrepreneurs not only affect their private decisions such as consumption and savings, assets transfer, life insurance and labor supply, but also their business decisions. Based on a large longitudinal data set of individuals in the United States, we find in our sample of business owners that they expect to live much longer (7.47% higher) than non business owners. Moreover, these entrepreneurs have better self-rated health, better health endowment, and are more likely to exercise frequently. In future work we will further disentangle the effects of these observable characteristics from those of unobserved heterogeneity.