“It won’t happen to me” VS “It could have been me” - Changes in health behavior initiated by a negative health shock to a peer

Sammanfattning: Despite being aware of the health risks associated with making “bad” health decisions, we seem to deny our personal vulnerability to the harmful effects of poor health behavior. Aiming to explore whether the harmful effects associated with poor health behavior are personalized once our peers suffer from them, reflected by improved health behavior and referred to as “peer effects”, this study uses individual-level U.S. data from the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS) on the health outcomes smoking behavior, BMI, (un)healthy food consumption, and exercise frequency. The predictor variable – a negative health shock to a peer – consists of the individual reporting that a biological parent and/or sibling has been diagnosed with asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, or stroke. The empirical strategy consists of OLS regressions including time fixed effects, with a further specification including individual fixed effects. The results were mixed: suggestive evidence of peer effects was found for several diagnoses, while other regressions showed a significant yet contrary, or often statistically non-significant effect. We conclude that this study does overall not find consistent evidence of individuals improving health behavior once a peer suffers a negative health shock. Especially the small number of observations for which variation in time can be exploited has major drawbacks for the explanatory power of the study.