Staying Healthy
Does Getting Forecasts Earlier Matter? Evidence from Winter Advisories and Vehicle Crashes
Vaibhav Anand
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025, Pages 106-134
Abstract:
Significant investments are directed toward improving the accuracy and early availability of forecasts. However, the value of longer lead times on forecasts is unclear. Using data on winter weather advisories and vehicle crashes in the United States, I show that advisories with longer lead times reduce crashes, even when they are less accurate than advisories with shorter lead times. Further, marginal benefits do not decrease with lead time. The benefits come from individual and institutional responses. When advisories arrive earlier, people visit fewer places, and snowplow crews intensify the road maintenance operations. These results have policy implications for providing effective forecasts.
Paternalistic Social Assistance: Evidence and Implications from Cash vs. In-Kind Transfers
Anna Chorniy, Amy Finkelstein & Matthew Notowidigdo
NBER Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
We estimate and compare impacts of cash and in-kind transfers on the consumption of temptation goods in the same population, and explore normative implications. We use two decades of data from South Carolina on cash benefits from Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and in-kind benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) linked to detailed data on adults’ health care use. Our empirical strategy examines outcome changes in the several days following each transfer’s scheduled monthly payout. Emergency department visits for drug and alcohol use increase by 20-30 percent following SSI receipt, but do not respond to SNAP receipt. Fills of prescription drugs for new illnesses also increase following SSI receipt but do not respond to SNAP receipt. Motivated by these non-fungibility results, we develop a model of a paternalistic social planner choosing the mix of cash and SNAP for a fixed-budget transfer program when consumers have self-control problems and may engage in mental accounting. We show that the planner’s optimal SNAP share is strictly positive and weakly increasing as self-control worsens. Moreover, with heterogeneity in self-control and mental accounting, the planner may choose to use SNAP even when they have access to a uniform Pigouvian tax on the temptation good.
Vaccine Incentives Harm Intrinsic Motivation: Evidence From a Priming Experiment
Johnny Huynh, Corey Jacinto & James Huynh
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Monetary incentives for vaccination may undermine intrinsic motivation, but evidence on this effect remains scarce. We conducted an experiment among 513 vaccine-hesitant adults to test whether priming individuals with a monetary incentive reduces their willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19. Our findings show that one in seven were willing to vaccinate without an incentive but declined the vaccine when asked to consider a payment. Additionally, priming participants lowered their perceptions of vaccine safety by 9 percentage points and prosocial attitudes toward vaccination by 10 percentage points. These negative effects were concentrated among men, racial and ethnic minorities, and participants with lower preexisting trust in the vaccine. Our results highlight an unintended consequence of vaccine incentives.
Body Politic: Disgust, Partisanship, and Public Opinion on Viral Outbreaks
Cindy Kam & John Sides
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does the public form opinions about viral outbreaks, including the steps they are personally willing to take and the policies governments should enact to mitigate the risk of infection and death? Drawing on surveys from 2016, 2020, and 2022, we compare attitudes toward three distinct outbreaks: the Ebola virus, the Zika virus, and the novel coronavirus that produced the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the differences across these outbreaks, we find that people’s level of disgust sensitivity underpins attitudes in all three cases. In contrast, party identification has a varying association with attitudes both across these outbreaks and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Disgust sensitivity also mitigates the association between party identification and COVID-19 attitudes, generating a degree of consensus at higher levels of disgust sensitivity even amid substantial partisan polarization.
The Outsized Impact of Behavioral Causes of Death on Longevity in the United States: Comparing Total and per Death Years of Life Lost
Glenn Firebaugh & Michael Light
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, November 2025
Abstract:
How significant are behavioral causes of death -- suicide, homicide, accidental poisoning, and traffic accidents -- in determining how long Americans live? By “determining,” the authors mean limiting or reducing, as they are looking at factors (causes of death) that reduce an individual’s length of life. This data visualization portrays the extent to which deaths from homicide, suicide, traffic accidents, and accidental poisoning disproportionately affect longevity (average lifespan) in the United States. The impact on longevity is about three times greater, on average, for deaths from behavioral causes than for deaths from cancer or heart disease. The outsized impact of behavioral causes of death underscores their strategic importance for improving longevity in the United States.
The Social and Individual Effects of Homeless Shelter: Evidence from Temporary Shelter Provision
Derek Christopher, Mark Duggan & Olivia Martin
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
What does homeless shelter achieve? We leverage administrative records of homeless services in Los Angeles County to construct a novel dataset of daily, site-level counts of shelter beds and occupants from 2014 to 2019. We pair this with daily, block-level crime incident data and daily, hospital-level data on ER visits to assess the relationship between shelter and area crime and health. We exploit variation from shocks to shelter availability from Los Angeles County's winter shelters program to study the effects of providing temporary shelter. We find that reducing unsheltered homelessness significantly reduces crime and ER visits for psychiatric conditions. We conclude with evidence that entering shelter also reduces short-run mortality but find no evidence that temporary shelter reduces future homelessness more than street outreach or other non-shelter services. Our findings suggest that shelter functions as a public good with high social benefits. When agents charged with provision of homeless services are evaluated on their ability to reduce overall homelessness, they are unlikely to internalize these benefits and may under provide shelter.
Income and education show distinct links to health and happiness in daily life
David Newman, Amie Gordon & Wendy Berry Mendes
Nature Human Behaviour, November 2025, Pages 2299-2312
Abstract:
With growing levels of inequality, understanding relationships between socioeconomic status (SES), health and well-being is as important as ever. Many studies focus on associations between an SES composite and either health ‘or’ happiness; here we examine unique relationships between SES indicators (income and education) and health ‘and’ well-being outcomes at both individual and community levels, drawing on a sample of adults (N = 71,385; Mage = 40.62, s.d. = 13.20) from more than 10 countries and representing 13,089 unique ZIP codes within the United States. A subset (N = 29,567) participated in an Ecological Momentary Assessment study by providing daily reports of their emotions, blood pressure and heart rate (Nobs = 329,543) for 3 weeks. Generally, higher levels of education were more consistently linked to indicators of better health, whereas higher levels of income were associated with higher levels of well-being. Individual-level SES predicted health and well-being more strongly than community-level factors.
Political Power and Mortality: Heterogeneous Effects of the U.S. Voting Rights Act
Atheendar Venkataramani et al.
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
We study the health consequences of redistributing political power through the 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act, which eliminated barriers to voting for previously disenfranchised nonwhite populations. The intervention led to broad declines in under-five mortality but sharply contrasting effects in other age groups: mortality fell among non-white children, younger adults, and older women, yet rose among whites and older non-white men. These differences cannot be reconciled by changes in population composition or material conditions. Instead, we present evidence suggesting psychosocial stress and retaliatory responses arising from perceived status threat as key mechanisms.
Cannabis and Respiratory Health
Jayani Jayawardhana, Jialin Hou & Johanna Catherine Maclean
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
Cannabis legalization has increased substantially in the past two decades with state-level policies that permit possession this product. A potential concern with cannabis legalization and the corresponding increase in consumption is that – because smoking is the most common consumption mode – respiratory health could worsen. In this study, we offer new evidence on the impact of recreational cannabis laws on asthma outcomes. To do so, we combine commercial health insurance claims and survey data over the period 2008 to 2022 with difference-in-differences and event-study methods. Our findings suggest that asthma diagnoses do not change following legalization of recreational cannabis, while asthma-related dispensed prescription medications decline, and asthma-related outpatient visits and inpatient hospitalizations are stable. An analysis of changes in use of smoked and non-smoked cannabis post-law suggests that, on net, the increase in overall cannabis use attributable to legalization is driven by use of non-smoked cannabis, which may explain why we find limited evidence that asthma outcomes worsen post-law. Collectively, these results suggest that expanded access to legal cannabis has not worsened respiratory health overall, and hint that some patients may use cannabis to manage asthma symptoms.