Mortality and economic fluctuations

Abstract

Using wavelet methods, this paper analyzes the relationship between the age-adjusted, infant, and cause-specific mortality rates and the business cycle in Sweden over the period 1800-2000 (1911-1996 for cause-specific mortality). For the period 1800-2000, an increase in GDP by 1% decreased mortality by 0.7%. This overall relationship is due to a strong counter-cyclical relationship in the nineteenth century, which disappeared in the twentieth century. In contrast, in the twentieth century higher mortality in economic upturns is found for mortality caused by circulatory diseases (including stroke) and accidents.

Asymmetric Effect of Business Cycles on Population Health: Evidence From the ASEAN Countries

“…Second, the hidden cointegration methodology introduced by Hatemi (26) was used to model the asymmetric effects of business cycles on population health in both long-and short-run. The asymmetric effects identified by our empirical model fill the gap of previous studies using the individual time series of advanced economies (9,21,22,28,29,49) and reconcile results from prior studies that document a pro-cyclical pattern between business cycles and population health (27)(28)(29)57) with other studies suggesting the changing relationship between business cycles and population health (12,21,22,36,49). This study, nevertheless, suffers from several limitations: First, our cointegrating analyses restricted in the bivariate type of analyses because the time series data regarding socio-economic variables other than real GDP per capita and life expectancy at birth across the ASEAN countries is too short to perform a reliable time series analyses.…”

“…Previous empirical findings have found that the relationship between business cycles and population health could be positive (27)(28)(29)57), negative (5)(6)(7)(8)14), or unrelated (37). However, the ambiguous relationship may result from the fact that business cycles may have asymmetric effects on population health.…”

“…The seminal studies conducted by Brenner (2-4) indicated that economic recessions lead to negative effects on health by increasing aggregate mortality rates and deaths from various causes and concluded that mortality is counter-cyclical with respect to business cycles. Following this line of time-series research, some researchers confirmed Brenner's opinions (27)(28)(29). However, other researchers criticized Brenner's empirical methodology for model misspecification, lag structure, omitted variable bias, and other statistical problems (30,31).…”

Estimating the income inequality-health relationship for the United States between 1941 and 2015: Will the relevant frequencies please stand up?

“…A large strand of literature focused on the (mental/physical) health-income relationship in a growth context (see Ruhm (2000Ruhm ( , 2003Ruhm ( , 2005, van den Berg et al (2017), Swift (2011), Chen (2017), 5 From a methodological point of view, exactly this point makes our paper different from, inter alia, Svensson and Krüger (2012) or Chen (2017). 6 One explanation for this finding is that during 1956-1993, shocks such as the Vietnam and the second Gulf war have a stronger effect for men's than for women's life expectancy.…”

“…5 / 29 Gerdtham and Johannesson (2005), Lam and Piérard (2017) or Svensson and Krüger (2012)). See Hollingsworth et al (2018) for a recent review of much of this research.…”