Winning Big but Feeling No Better? The Effect of Lottery Prizes on Physical and Mental Health

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect of income on health, as the amount won by winners is largely exogenous. Positive income shocks have no significant effect on general health, but a large positive effect on mental health. This result seems paradoxical on two levels. First, there is a well-known status gradient in health in cross-section data, and, second, general health should partly reflect mental health, so that we may expect both variables to move in the same direction. We propose a solution to the first apparent paradox by underlining the endogeneity of income. For the second, we show that lottery winnings are also associated with more smoking and social drinking. General health will reflect both mental health and the effect of these behaviors, and so may not improve following a positive income shock. This paper thus presents the first microeconomic analogue of previous work which has highlighted the negative health consequences of good macroeconomic conditions.income, self-assessed health, mental health, smoking, drinking

Family income and child health in the UK

Recent studies examining the relationship between family income and child health in the UK have produced mixed findings. We re-examine the income gradient in child general health and its evolution with child age in this country, using a very large sample of British children. We find that there is no correlation between income and child general health at ages 0-1, that the gradient emerges around age 2 and is constant from age 2 to age 17. In addition, we show that the gradient remains large and significant when we try to address the endogeneity of income. Furthermore, our results indicate that the gradient in general health reflects a greater prevalence of chronic conditions among lowincome children and a greater severity of these conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that income does matter for child health in the UK and may play a role in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status

Winning big but feeling no better? The effect of lottery prizes on physical and mental health

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviors (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect of income on health, as the amount won by winners is largely exogenous. Positive income shocks have no significant effect on general health, but a large positive effect on mental health. This result seems paradoxical on two levels. First, there is a well-known status gradient in health in cross-section data, and, second, general health should partly reflect mental health, so that we may expect both variables to move in the same direction. We propose a solution to the first apparent paradox by underlining the endogeneity of income. For the second, we show that lottery winnings are also associated with more smoking and social drinking. General health will reflect both mental health and the effect of these behaviors, and so may not improve following a positive income shock. This paper thus presents the first microeconomic analogue of previous work which has highlighted the negative health consequences of good macroeconomic conditions

Malaria prevalence, indoor residual spraying, and insecticide-treated net usage in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper analyzes the effect of malaria prevalence and indoor residual spraying on the probability of sleeping under an insecticide-treated bed net in nine Sub-Saharan countries. Specifically, it examines whether bed net usage is elastic with respect to malaria prevalence and whether indoor residual spraying, which is a public intervention, crowds out bed net usage, which is a private behavior. Using data on individual bed net usage and household indoor residual spraying combined with local malaria prevalence, we show that malaria prevalence has a positive effect on bed net usage, but that bed net usage is inelastic with respect to malaria prevalence, with elasticity ranging from 0.42 for adult women to 0.59 for older children, in our preferred model. We also find that indoor residual spraying does not crowd out bed net usage. Instead, individuals who live in houses that were recently sprayed are more likely to use a bed net

Inequality and polarisation in health systems’ responsiveness: a cross-country analysis

The World Health Report 2000 proposed three fundamental goals for health systems encompassing population health, health care finance and health systems responsiveness. The goals incorporate both an efficiency and equity dimension. While inequalities in population health and health care finance have motivated two important strands of research, inequalities in responsiveness have received less attention in health economics. This paper examines inequality and polarisation in responsiveness, bridging this gap in the literature and contributing towards an integrated analysis of health systems performance. It uses data from the World Health Survey to measure and compare inequalities in responsiveness across 25 European countries. In order to respect the inherently ordinal nature of the responsiveness data, median-based measures of inequality and polarisation are employed. The results suggest that, in the face of wide differences in the health systems analysed, there exists large variability in inequality in responsiveness across countries

Etapas de Rf/Fi de un sistema de 3ª generación Umts con antenas adaptativas

The technology of smart or adaptive antennas for mobile communications has received enormous interest worldwide in recent years. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of the RF/FI subsystem of a node B designed with adaptive antennas. The design must be done in order to pass all the specifications that 3gpp indicates for this system. This paper presents the basic structure of transmition and reception RF modules. A short explanation of the principal characteristics is introduced and the general structure of the modules is viewed

The impact of the UK National Minimum Wage on mental health

Despite an emerging literature, there is still sparse and mixed evidence on the wider societal benefits of Minimum Wage policies, including their effects on mental health. Furthermore, causal evidence on the relationship between earnings and mental health is limited. We focus on low-wage earners, who are at higher risk of psychological distress, and exploit the quasi-experiment provided by the introduction of the UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) to identify the causal impact of wage increases on mental health. We employ difference-in-differences models and find that the introduction of the UK NMW had no effect on mental health. Our estimates do not appear to support earlier findings which indicate that minimum wages affect mental health of low-wage earners. A series of robustness checks accounting for measurement error, as well as treatment and control group composition, confirm our main results. Overall, our findings suggest that policies aimed at improving the mental health of low-wage earners should either consider the non-wage characteristics of employment or potentially larger wage increases

Health policies and the relationships between socioeconomic status, access to health care, and health

Health policies tend to focus on improving the access to health care of persons of low-socioeconomic status to improve their health. This commentary argues that health policies directly directed at health and socioeconomic status (and other components of individual welfare) will also be effective if one wants to improve the well-being of the poor

Mental health and the overall tendency to follow official recommendations against COVID-19: A U-shaped relationship?

This paper investigates the association between several mental health indicators (depression, anxiety, stress, and loneliness) and the overall tendency to follow official recommendations regarding self-protection against COVID-19 (i.e., overall compliance). We employ panel data from the COME-HERE survey, collected over four waves, on 7,766 individuals (22,878 observations) from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. Employing a flexible specification that allows the association to be non-monotonic, we find a U-shaped relationship, in which transitions to low and high levels of mental health are associated with higher overall compliance, while transitions to medium levels of mental health are associated with less overall compliance. Moreover, anxiety, stress, and loneliness levels at baseline (i.e., at wave 1) also have a U-shaped effect on overall compliance later (i.e., recommendations are followed best by those with lowest and highest levels of anxiety, stress, and loneliness at baseline, while following the recommendations is lowest for those with moderate levels of these variables). These U shapes, which are robust to several specifications, may explain some of the ambiguous results reported in the previous literature. Additionally, we observe a U-shaped association between the mental health indicators and a number of specific health behaviours (including washing hands and mask wearing). Importantly, most of these specific behaviours play a role in overall compliance. Finally, we uncover the role of gender composition effects in some of the results. While variations in depression and stress are negatively associated with variations in overall compliance for men, the association is positive for women. The U-shaped relation in the full sample (composed of males and females) will reflect first the negative slope for males and then the positive slope for females