In the context of Sweden, we show that having a doctor in family raises preventive health investments throughout life cycle, improves physical health, and prolongs life. Two quasi-experimental research designs—medical school admission lotteries variation timing medical degrees—support causal interpretation these effects. A hypothetical policy would bring same behavior changes benefits to all Sw...

We contribute to the literature on the determinants of socioeconomic health disparities by studying how the health behavior of adolescents may arise from the degree of communication between parent and child. Parent-child communication may function as a mediator between family background and subsequent poor health behavior, potentially reconciling previous mixed evidence on the relationship betw...

Indebted and Overweight: The Link Between Weight and Household Debt There is a substantial correlation between household debt and bodyweight. Theory suggests that a causal relationship between debt and bodyweight could run in either direction or both could be caused by unobserved common factors. We use OLS and Propensity Score Matching to ascertain if household debt (measured by credit card ind...

The Economic Case for Devoting Public Resources to Health The world has enjoyed huge improvements in population health during the last half century. But major health problems persist, particularly in tropical countries, which are still struggling with infectious diseases while increasingly having to deal with noncommunicable diseases. Several classic arguments for public spending on health have...

abstract governments in regional and national level try to improve economic and productivity growth by different polices. the being aware of effective factors in national and regional economic and productivity growth is essential for government success. in this paper, to being of aware determinant factors in productivity inequality, we use decomposition approach and econometric estimation for 2...