Self-reported health in good times and in bad: Ireland in the 21st century

Kevin Denny and Patricia Franken

No 201607, Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin

Abstract: The Great Recession has renewed interest in whether and how health responds to macroeconomic changes. Ireland provides a convenient natural experiment to examine this since a period of sustained high growth and low unemployment – the so-called Celtic Tiger period- gave way to a deep recession following the economic crisis in 2008. We use data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (SILC), to explore what happened to self-reported health over the period 2002-2014. While some sub-populations experienced pro-cyclical effects on self-rated health, in general we find no evidence that the proportion of the population in poor health was higher after the onset of the economic crisis. However a multivariate model implies that there was some effect at the top of the health distribution with a higher unemployment rate switching individuals from being in “very good health” to “good health”. Effect sizes are much larger for females than males.

Keywords: Self-reported health; Well-being; Recession; Unemployment; Ireland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 I18 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-hea
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http://hdl.handle.net/10197/7859 First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Self-reported health in good times and in bad: Ireland in the 21st century (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucn:wpaper:201607

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