Healthy Bodies and Thick Wallets: The Dual Relation between Health and Economic Status

The first section of this paper documents the size of the association between health and one prominent economic status measure--household wealth. The next section deals with how health influences economic status by sketching out reasons why health may alter household savings (and eventually wealth) and then providing estimates of the empirical magnitude of these effects. The third section shifts attention to the other pathway--the links between economic status and health--and summarizes major controversies and evidence surrounding these issues.