Is it Money or Marriage that Keeps People Alive.pdf

1Is it Money or Marriage that Keeps People Alive? Jonathan Gardner, Andrew Oswald* Department of Economics Warwick University Coventry CV4 7AL UK August 2002 Abstract It is believed that the length of a person’s life depends on a mixture of economic and social factors. Yet the relative importance of these is still debated. We provide evidence in this paper that marriage has a much more important (positive) effect on longevity than high income does. For men, it almost exactly offsets the large negative effect of smoking. Economics, however, plays little or no role. After controlling for health at the start of the 1990s, we find no reliable evidence that income affects the probability of death over the subsequent decade. Keywords: Mortality, health, income, marriage. JEL Classifications: I12, J12, * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-24-7653-2510; Fax: +44-24-7652-3032 Email address: andrew.oswald@warwick.ac.uk (A.Oswald). 21. Introduction The epidemiological evidence suggests that the length of a person’s life depends on a mixture of economic and social factors. Yet their relative importance is still debated. For all sorts of reasons, including the appropriate design of economic and social policy, it is important to understand which set of forces matters most in prolonging healthy life. The paper explores this issue by using recent longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Retirement Survey. Panel data have the crucial advantage that it is possible to control for health at the start of the period. We estimate equations for the probability of death over the 1990s. After examination of the data our main focus becomes a specific question: is it money or marriage that keeps people alive? The findings seem of interest. To our surprise, we can detect only minor effects from economics. Marriage, by contrast, has a large effect on mortality risk. 2. Previous research 2.1 Socio-economic s