Biased health perceptions and risky health behaviors-Theory and evidence.

This paper investigates the role of biased health perceptions as a potential driving force of risky health behaviors. We define absolute and relative health perception biases, illustrate their measurement in surveys and provide evidence on their relevance. Next, we decompose the theoretical effect into its extensive and intensive margin: When the extensive margin dominates, people (wrongly) believe they are healthy enough to "afford" unhealthy behavior. Finally, using three population surveys, we provide robust empirical evidence that respondents who overestimate their health are less likely to exercise and sleep enough, but more likely to eat unhealthily and drink alcohol daily.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Journal of Health Economics

• Publication date

  2021-01-22

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Economics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.2139/ssrn.3594130PMID 33578326
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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