Business Cycles and Mortality Rates - Aggregate Data for the EU-15 Countries 1990-2012

The relationship between business cycles and mortality has been a highly debated subject in the field of economics. The majority of previous studies, using the unemployment rate as the main proxy for macroeconomic conditions, have found ambiguous effects largely depending on how the effect is estimated. This thesis follows the methodology used by Ruhm (2000), but instead applies aggregate data for a sample of European countries; namely the EU-15 countries. Our sample period stretches from 1990 to 2012, extending upon previous research by looking at the associated relationship in more recent times. Using fixed-effects estimations with the unemployment rate as the main proxy for macroeconomic conditions, we investigate the effect of joblessness on total mortality rates, age-specific mortality, sex-specific death rates as well as cause-specific mortality rates. Our findings demonstrate evidence of a significant procyclical relationship between unemployment and mortality, implying that aggregate average health improves as the economy deteriorates. The procyclical association is found to be significant for age groups 15-44 and 60-74, and the male sub-sample seemed to benefit more from increased unemployment than female counterparts. The thesis also contributed to the existing literature by showing that alternative business cycles, such as GDP growth, follow a similar pattern as unemployment rates

Oil Price Shocks and Stock Market Returns: A study on Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

Following the oil price shocks of the 1970s, a great deal of research has been focused on the relationship between oil price changes and macroeconomic variables. However, the body of literature focusing on oil price shocks and stock markets are more limited. In our thesis, we have decided to focus on five OECD countries: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, commonly known as the PIIGS economies in financial markets due to their high levels of debt and budget deficits in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis of 2008/2009. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between oil price shocks and stock market returns. We employ an unrestricted vector autoregressive (VAR) model containing five variables in order to assess the different effects. We have chosen a linear specification of the world real oil price, and also included other variables connected to stock market returns. These variables are short-term interest rate, long-term interest rate and industrial production. The sample period contains monthly observations from 1993m07 to 2014m01. We have also divided the sample into a subsample covering the years from 1993m07 to 2008m08, to be able to compare the period with and without the financial crisis. Our main results show indications of a negative impact of linear oil price shocks on real stock returns in all countries. This effect was, however, statistically insignificant. The same applies for the interest rates. When dividing the sample, and excluding the financial crisis, we saw from the forecast error variance decomposition results an increase in the contribution of the real oil price to the variability in real stock returns