Within the framework of the TSE chair, Catarina Goulao and Agustin Pérez-Barahona have just published a new working paper which studies the influence of social health standards on the spread of chronic Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).

They show how adults’ consumption choices impact both their own health capital in old age and the health capital of their children, leading to a negative intergenerational externality that encourages adults to make consumption and activity choices that are not socially optimal and are likely to degrade their own subsequent health conditions as well as those of their children.

They also show how fiscal policies and particularly sin taxes, combined with social standards requiring agents to be as healthy as the previous generation, compensate for the incentive to make sub-optimal choices during adulthood