Business cycles and mortality: results from Swedish microdata.
We assess the relationship between business cycles and mortality risk using a large individual level data set on over 40,000 individuals in Sweden who were followed for 10-16 years (leading to over 500,000 person-year observations). We test the effect of six alternative business cycle indicators on the mortality risk: the unemployment rate, the notification rate, the deviation from the GDP trend, the GDP change, the industry capacity utilization, and the industry confidence indicator. For men we find a significant countercyclical relationship between the business cycle and the mortality risk for four of the indicators and a non-significant effect for the other two indicators. For women we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no effect for any of the business cycle indicators.
Gerdtham
Ulf-G
UG
Department of Community Medicine, Lund University, Malmö University Hospital, SE-205 02 Malmö, Sweden. ulf.gerdtham@smi.mas.lu.se
Johannesson
Magnus
M
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002423:Cause of Death / Q000639:trends; D003132:Commerce / Q000639:trends*; D004467:Economics / Q000639:trends*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009026:Mortality / Q000639:trends*; D011336:Probability; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012306:Risk; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D016019:Survival Analysis; D013548:Sweden / Q000453:epidemiology; D014478:Unemployment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*