Robert Östling

År 2021 tilldelades professorerna Erik Lindqvist och Robert Östling Assar Lindbeck-medaljen. Medaljen delas ut vartannat år av Nationalekonomiska Föreningen, genom stiftelsen Assar Lindbeck-medaljen, till i Sverige verksamma forskare under 45 år som gett ett signifikant bidrag till ekonomiskt tänkande och ekonomisk kunskap. Den här artikeln baseras på pristagarnas föreläsning som hölls i samband med att medaljen delades ut under Nationella konferensen i nationalekonomi den 11 november 2022. Artikeln sammanfattar ett antal uppmärksammade studier om hur plötslig rikedom, i form av lotterivinster, påverkar exempelvis individers arbetskraftsutbud, hälsa och upplevda välbefinnande.

We estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation using administrative data on Swedish lottery players. A $150,000 windfall gain increases stock ownership probability among pre-lottery non-participants by 12 percentage points, while pre-lottery stock holders are unaffected. The effect is immediate, seemingly permanent and heterogeneous in intuitive ways. Standard lifecycle models predict wealth effects far too large to match our causal estimates under common calibrations. Additional analyses suggest a limited role for explanations such as procrastination or real-estate investment. Overall, results suggest that “nonstandard” beliefs or preferences contribute to the nonparticipation of households across many demographic groups.

We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being 522 years after a major lottery event and analysed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade and show no evidence of dissipating over time. The estimated treatment effects on happiness and mental health are significantly smaller. Follow-up analyses of domain-specific aspects of life satisfaction implicate financial life satisfaction as an important mediator for the long-run increase in overall life satisfaction.

We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. Winning a lottery prize modestly reduces earnings, with the reduction being immediate, persistent, and quite similar by age, education, and sex. A calibrated dynamic model implies lifetime marginal propensities to earn out of unearned income from -0.17 at age 20 to -0.04 at age 60, and labor supply elasticities in the lower range of previously reported estimates. The earnings response is stronger for winners than their spouses, which is inconsistent with unitary household labor supply models

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large as the crosssectional wealth-mortality gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children's health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, including drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets, causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth-mortality gradients, nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income.