Eliason, Marcus, and Donald Storrie. 2009. “Does Job Loss Shorten Life?” Journal of Human Resources 44(2): 227–302.
This paper examines the impact of job loss on overall and cause-specific mortality. Using linked employer-employee data, we identified the workers displaced due to all establishment closures in Sweden in 1987 and 1988. Hence, we have extended the case study approach, which has dominated the plant closure literature. The overall mortality risk among men increased by 44 percent during the first four years following job loss, while there was no impact on either female overall mortality or in the longer run. For both sexes, however, there was an about twofold short-run increase in suicides and alcohol-related mortality.
Marcus Eliason is a research fellow at the Centre for European Labour Market Studies (CELMS), Department of Economics, Göteborg University, and at the Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU). Donald Storrie is Research Manager at the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. The authors are grateful for helpful comments and suggestions from Anders Björklund, Ralph Catalano, Anders Forslund, Daniel Hamermesh, Henry Ohlsson, two anonymous referees; seminar participants at Göteborg University, IFAU, SOFI, ALI; and conference participants at the 3rd International Conference on Unemployment and Health, and the 17th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Population Economics. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Swedish Research Council. Any views expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. The administrative data used in this paper are proprietary and were received from Statistics Sweden. The authors are not in a position to make the data available to other users, but Statistics Sweden may provide access subject to approval of an application. The authors will help researchers interested in seeking access to these data as best they can. Correspondence to: Marcus Eliason, Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU), P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. E-mail: marcus.eliason@ifau.uu.se.