Unemployment Makes You Sick, But High Unemployment Makes Us Healthy

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that unemployment leads to poor health, but other studies have also shown that population health improves when the unemployment rate is higher. This paper resolves these seemingly contradictory results by analyzing the effects of both unemployment and the unemployment rate on health using individual-level panel data. I find that unemployment worsens health, controlling for reverse causality by considering individuals who lost their jobs due to firm closure, and that an increase in the unemployment rate improves health, controlling for changes in employment status. Furthermore, the effect of the unemployment rate on health is limited only to individuals who remain employed during business fluctuations. The unemployment literature and the unemployment rate literature are therefore capturing effects on different individuals.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2010

Author	Le, Sidney
Primary advisor	Bhattacharya, Jayanta
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Economics

Subject	Stanford Department of Economics
Subject	unemployment
Subject	health
Subject	business cycles
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/fy607ns4057

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Preferred Citation: Le, Sidney. (2010). Unemployment Makes You Sick, But High Unemployment Makes Us Healthy. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/fy607ns4057

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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