Lifestyles; Health investments; Macroeconomic conditions
Recent evidence indicates that mortality decreases when the economy temporarily deteriorates. Using aggregate data for a panel of the 50 states and district of Columbia over a 20-year period (1972–1991), Ruhm (2000) estimates that a one percentage point rise in unemployment reduces the total death rate by 0.5%. Compared to earlier research, this analysis has the advantage of utilizing fixed-effect (FE) models that exploit within-state changes and so automatically control for time-invariant factors that are spuriously correlated with economic conditions across locations. 1 Other studies use similar methods to document a fall in total fatalities during downturns for 50 Spanish provinces over the 1980–1997 period ( Tapia Granados, 2002), 16 German states from 1980 to 2000 ( Neumayer, 2004) and 23 OECD countries between 1960 and 1997 ( Gerdtham and Ruhm, 2004)rch.