Does health information affect lifestyle behaviours? The impact of a diabetes diagnosis Gaggero, Alessio Jiménez Rubio, María Dolores Diabetes Health information Lifestyle behaviours Body mass index Regression discontinuity design Administrative data Despite an increasing interest in the effect of health information on health-behaviours, evidence on the causal impact of a diagnosis on lifestyle factors is still mixed and does not often account for long-term effects. We explore the role of health information in individual health-related decisions by identifying the causal impact of a type-2 diabetes diagnosis on body mass index (BMI) and lifestyle behaviours. We employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) exploiting the exogenous cut-off value in the diagnosis of type-2 diabetes provided by a biomarker (glycated haemoglobin) drawn from unique administrative longitudinal data from Spain. We find that following a type-2 diabetes diagnosis individuals appear to reduce their weight in the short-term. Differently from previous studies, we also provide evidence of statistically significant long-term impacts of a type-2 diabetes diagnosis on BMI up to three years from the diagnosis. We do not find perceivable effects of a type-2 diabetes diagnosis on quitting smoking or drinking. Overall, health information appears to have a sustained causal impact on weight reduction, a key lifestyle and risk factor among individuals with type-2 diabetes. 2023-01-25T13:23:58Z 2023-01-25T13:23:58Z 2022-10-17 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Alessio Gaggero... [et al.]. Does health information affect lifestyle behaviours? The impact of a diabetes diagnosis, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 314, 2022, 115420, ISSN 0277-9536, [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115420] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/79340 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115420 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 4.0 Internacional Elsevier