Are recessions still healthy? Empirical evidence regarding the relationship between mortality and macroeconomic conditions

Abstract: The relationship between macroeconomic conditions and mortality has previously been established to be procyclical, which means that mortality has decreased during recessions and vice versa. This has been shown for various settings. However, more recent findings suggests that the procyclicality between mortality and macroeconomic conditions have undergone a secular shift from being procyclical to being unrelated to each other in the U.S.. Using a dataset with aggregated data for 16 OECD-countries during the period 1980-2019, I find that there still is a procyclical relationship between mortality and macroeconomic conditions, with a 1 percentage point increase in national unemployment rate suggesting a decrease of total mortality with around 0.6 percent for the whole period. When examining the data with a more flexible sample strategy, a similar pattern as Ruhm (2015) found can be observed, suggesting that the magnitude of the procyclicality might be fading out also for other countries although not in the same pace as in the U.S.. Two potential explanations for the secular shift that are presented by Ruhm (2015) are revisited with the conclusion being that less macroeconomic volatility does not appear to be a reasonable explanation, but the increase of mortality caused by accidental poisonings may be an explanation for the U.S. but not for the rest of the sample.