‘Recessions, healthy no more?’: A note on Recessions, Gender and Mortality in France

Abstract

URL des Documents de travail : http://ces.univ-paris1.fr/cesdp/cesdp2016.htmlDocuments de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 2016.08 - ISSN : 1955-611XThis study uses aggregate panel data on 96 French départements from 1982 to 2012 to investigate the relationship between macroeconomic conditions, gender and mortality. I use previously employed panel data methods, based on mortality variation across French départements and years. The novelty is to analyze the effect of gender-specific unemployment on gender-specific mortality. Within this “area-gender approach”, I give a particular attention to gender-cause-specific mortality such as prostate cancer, maternal mortality, female breast cancer, cervical cancer and ovarian cancer in addition to other cause-specific mortality. The analysis is undertaken for several age-groups, several time windows and different geographical aggregates of unemployment. The results reveal that the relationship between unemployment and mortality in France is weak and confirm recent conclusions from U.S. state-level analysis by Rhum [Ruhm, C.J., 2015. Recessions, Healthy no more?. Journal of Health Economics 42, 17-28]