Why Do More People Die During Economic Expansions?

Ann Stevens, Douglas Miller, Marianne Page and Mateusz Filipski

Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: Consider this seeming paradox: when economic times are good, deaths in the United States increase. The reasons for this economic impact on mortality are not well understood, but the negative health effects of over-work, stress, and work-related behavior are often cited as culprits. However, this explanation is not completely persuasive, because other evidence shows that losing a job when the economy sours causes individuals' health to deterioate. If that were the case, it would seem that, during good economic times, mortality would decline. These conflicting theories about the effect of indviduals' work on their own health suggest that the mechanisms driving the unemployment-mortality link are more complex.

Pages: 7 pages
Date: 2012-04, Revised 2012-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://crr.bc.edu/briefs/why-do-more-people-die-during-economic-expansions/ R
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://crr.bc.edu/briefs/why-do-more-people-die-during-economic-expansions/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://crr.bc.edu/briefs/why-do-more-people-die-during-economic-expansions/)

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:crr:issbrf:ib2012-8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Grzybowski () and Christopher F Baum ().