Health and health behaviors during the great recession: a note on drinking, smoking, obesity, and physical activity

Erdal Tekin, Chandler McClellan and Karen Jean Minyard
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Chandler McClellan: American University, IZA and NBER
Karen Jean Minyard: Georgia State University

Review of Economics of the Household, 2018, vol. 16, issue 4, No 6, 1017-1026

Abstract: Abstract Previous studies have shown that recessions are typically associated with better health and health behaviors. With the exception of a few recent studies however, these studies focus on sample periods that end prior to the Great Recession. The few exceptions that extend the analysis period beyond the Great Recession suggest that the pro-cyclical relationship between macroeconomic conditions and mortality obtained in earlier studies might have weakened over time. In this paper, we revisited the relationship between state unemployment rate and a large set of outcomes of health and health behaviors using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) between 1990 and 2014. Overall, our results suggest that state unemployment rate is weakly related to both health and health behaviors as our estimates are too small to have any meaningful implications, although they are largely imprecisely estimated. Finally, we tested whether the Great Recession played a significant role in influencing the pattern in the relationship between unemployment rate and health and health behaviors. Our results from this analysis do not reveal any measurable recession effect, although the estimates are again largely imprecise.

Keywords: BRFSS; Health; Recession; Unemployment; Smoking; Obesity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 I10 I12 I14 I15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11150-017-9364-2

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