The Association between the Volatility of Income and Life Expectancy in the United States

Anna L. Ziff, Emily Wiemers and V. Joseph Hotz

Journal of Labor Economics, 2025, vol. 43, issue S1, S153 - S178

Abstract: We examine the relationship between income volatility and life expectancy in mid-sized US commuting zones between 2006 and 2014. We use a commercial dataset, InfoUSA, to measure income volatility, which we link to estimates of life expectancy by gender, county, race, and income. We find that higher income volatility in a county is associated with lower life expectancy but only at the bottom of the income distribution and primarily for non-Hispanic Whites. Though we cannot extrapolate our findings to individual-level relationships, we do link them to existing literatures on place-based differences in mortality and the relationship between volatility and health.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/732668 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/732668 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/732668

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Labor Economics from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().