Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky health behaviors. 

The past decade has seen a rise in both economic insecurity and frequency of physical pain. The current research reveals a causal connection between these two growing and consequential social trends.

Quantal Response Equilibrium presents a stochastic theory of games that unites probabilistic choice models developed in psychology and statistics with the Nash equilibrium approach of classical game theory.

This analysis summarizes prior research and uses national, US state and county‐level data from 1976 to 2013 to examine whether the mortality effects of economic crises differ in kind from those of the more typical fluctuations. The tentative conclusion is that economic crises affect mortality rates (and presumably other measures of health) in the same way as less severe downturns – leading to improvements in physical health.

The purpose of this paper is to describe proposals for reform of low-income housing assistance that will alleviate poverty without increasing public spending. Low-income housing assistance is fertile ground for such reforms.

We examine how deaths and emergency department (ED) visits related to use of opioid analgesics (opioids) and other drugs vary with macroeconomic conditions. As the county unemployment rate increases by one percentage point, the opioid death rate per 100,000 rises by 0.19 (3.6%) and the opioid overdose ED visit rate per 100,000 increases by 0.95 (7.0%).

We investigate the predictive power of survey-elicited time preferences. The discount factor elicited from choice experiments using real payments predicts various health, energy, and financial outcomes, including overall self-reported health, smoking, installing energy-efficient lighting, and credit card balance. 

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. 

We use the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and other sources to examine how cognitive performance near the end of secondary schooling relates to labour market outcomes through age fifty. Our preferred estimates control for individual and family backgrounds, non-cognitive attributes, and survey years.