Impacts of Housing Costs on Health and Satisfaction With Life Circumstances: Evidence From Australia

Ashani Abayasekara, Jun Sung Kim and Liang Choon Wang

Health Economics, 2025, vol. 34, issue 4, 741-757

Abstract: This paper examines the causal impacts of rising housing costs on individual health and satisfaction with life circumstances, using a fixed‐effects instrumental variable approach and individual‐level panel data from Australia. Relying on the historical patterns of immigrant settlement, we construct an instrumental variable that exploits exogenous variation in housing costs driven by foreign investments that flow differentially into localities. We find that rising housing costs—as measured by composite housing costs faced by homeowners and renters living in an area—have a significant positive impact on individuals' self‐assessed physical health and a significant negative impact on satisfaction ratings, but no significant impact on self‐assessed emotional health. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the positive effects on physical health are mainly concentrated among homeowners, the well‐educated, and older individuals.

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4934

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:wly:hlthec:v:34:y:2025:i:4:p:741-757

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().