IJE Advance Access originally published online on July 28, 2005
International Journal of Epidemiology 2005 34(6):1206-1211; doi:10.1093/ije/dyi143
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2005; all rights reserved.
Commentary |
Commentary: Mortality increases during economic upturns
Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402-6165, USA and National Bureau of Economic Research. E-mail: chrisruhm@uncg.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The conventional wisdom is that mortality falls when the economy temporarily improves and increases when it weakens. This strong apriori belief has engendered substantial attention to be paid to analyses indicating a countercyclical variation in deaths and excessive scepticism to countervailing evidence. However, this view is beginning to change as recent research, often using more sophisticated methodological designs than earlier studies, commonly finds that fatalities rise during economic upturns. ‘Increasing Mortality During Expansions of the US Economy, 1900–1996’ by José Tapia Granados1 contributes to this new understanding by showing that the secular decline in US mortality accelerates during economic recessions and slows or reverses in expansions. His analysis utilizes time-series data on total deaths, as well as age-specific and cause-specific mortality.
The use of time series data for a single geographic location is traditional in this research. The next section discusses how the resulting literature has obtained ambiguous results, in
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Time series analyses |
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Pooled data with location-specific fixed effects |
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Estimated effects on mortality and morbidity |
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Why does mortality rise during economic upturns? |
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Conclusion |
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