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.
Department of Community Medicine, Lund University, Malmö University Hospital, SE-205 02 Malmö, Sweden. ulf.gerdtham@smi.mas.lu.se
Ulf-G
UG
Gerdtham
Magnus
M
Johannesson
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*