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Business cycles and mortality: results from Swedish microdata

2004; Elsevier BV; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.socscimed.2004.05.004

1873-5347

Ulf‐G. Gerdtham, Magnus Johannesson,

Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management

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.