RecessionsHealth TERMINATED

Project "RecessionsHealth" data sheet

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 Project objective

My postdoctoral project for the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie fellowship deals with recessions and health. The aim of the proposal is to provide a comprehensive analysis of how individual health is affected (both in the short and in the long-run) when recessions cause uncertainty on the labour-market. To achieve this aim, I will exploit two major recessions – the 2008 Great Recession and the 1990s Swedish recession – as well as particularly rich administrative data to answer two well-posed and policy-relevant questions:

(1) Do individuals who experience major labour-market uncertainty during by recessions suffer from health disorders in the short-run? (2) Do recessions at career entry negatively affect health over the life-course – and in particular in the long-run?

To adress these questions, the proposal will tackle two related and complementary specific objectives:

(1) Analyse the short-term consequences of the drastic cuts in art subsidies in the Netherlands in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession – which triggered major labour market uncertainty in the art sector – on health outcomes for individuals in the art sector. (2) Investigate the long-run health effects of graduating in the 1990s Swedish Great recession using an innovative life-course perspective.

Both the framework and the methodology used in these two projects are challenging and new. First, I exploit natural experiments as exogenous shocks on labour-market conditions, which allows deriving causal estimates. Second, I use particularly rich linked administrative data over long periods of time, which enables me to take a life-course perspective. I strongly believe that this unprecedented combination of the original concepts, the methodology, that is completely new to the field, and my particularly large and rich datasets will provide a completely new avenue to understand how individual health responding to labour-market uncertainty caused by recessions is affected, both in the short and long-run.