Related Experiment Videos
Mortality and the business cycle: Evidence from individual and aggregated data
Gerard J van den Berg1, Ulf-G Gerdtham2, Stephanie von Hinke3
1School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom; The Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), Uppsala, Sweden.
Abstract:
There has been much interest recently in the relationship between economic conditions and mortality, with some studies showing that mortality is pro-cyclical, while others find the opposite. Some suggest that the aggregation level of analysis (e.g. individual vs. regional) matters. We use both individual and aggregated data on a sample of 20-64 year-old Swedish men from 1993 to 2007. Our results show that the association between the business cycle and mortality does not depend on the level of analysis: the sign and magnitude of the parameter estimates are similar at the individual level and the aggregate (county) level; both showing pro-cyclical mortality.