TY - JOUR AU - Finkelstein,Amy AU - Luttmer,Erzo F.P. AU - Notowidigdo,Matthew J. TI - What Good Is Wealth Without Health? The Effect of Health on the Marginal Utility of Consumption JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14089 PY - 2008 Y2 - June 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14089 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14089.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Amy Finkelstein Department of Economics MIT E52-350 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617/253-4149 Fax: 617/868-2742 E-Mail: afink@mit.edu Erzo F.P. Luttmer Kennedy School of Government, Mailbox 25 Harvard University 79 John F. Kennedy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-0118 Fax: 617/495-2575 E-Mail: erzo_luttmer@harvard.edu Matthew J. Notowidigdo MIT Department of Economics E52-204F 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge MA 02142 E-Mail: noto@mit.edu AB - We estimate how the marginal utility of consumption varies with health. To do so, we develop a simple model in which the impact of health on the marginal utility of consumption can be estimated from data on permanent income, health, and utility proxies. We estimate the model using the Health and Retirement Study's panel data on the elderly and near-elderly, and proxy for utility with measures of subjective well-being. We find robust evidence that the marginal utility of consumption declines as health deteriorates. Our central estimate is that a one-standard-deviation increase in the number of chronic diseases is associated with an 11 percent decline in the marginal utility of consumption relative to this marginal utility when the individual has no chronic diseases. The 95 percent confidence interval allows us to reject declines in marginal utility of less than 2 percent or more than 17 percent. Point estimates from a wide range of alternative specifications tend to lie within this confidence interval. We present some simple, illustrative calibration results that suggest that state dependence of the magnitude we estimate can have a substantial effect on important economic problems such as the optimal level of health insurance benefits and the optimal level of life-cycle savings. ER -