Does Stress Shorten Your Life? Evidence from Parental Bereavement

Abstract

This paper studies how stress affects the mortality risk. Using a flexible approach and allowing for timevarying treatment effects, I find no impact of stress on the short-run mortality risk but a substantially increase in the long-run. The effects are especially pronounced for men. I provide evidence that this is likely caused by changes towards adverse health behaviours as a reaction to stress. Investigating the possible protective effects of mental health support, I find that it can substantially lower the mortality risk for women. The results for men point towards lower effectiveness likely due to stigma effects associated with mental health care. Finally, I show that my results are robust to specific departure of my identifying assumptions.

Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation

“…30 In online Appendix Table A4, we present results from these specifications where the older sibling's outcomes considered are: an indicator for a low-birth-weight birth (less than 2,500 grams), an indicator for a pre-term birth (less than 37 weeks gestation), an indicator for ever being hospitalized before age 1 for a condition originating in the perinatal period, an indicator for ever consuming drugs treating ADHD between ages 9 and 11, and indicators for ever consuming drugs treating anxiety and depression between ages 34 and 36. 31 These are the main outcomes for which we find effects in Section IV, and we therefore use them as "placebo outcomes" in this analysis. Just as in the main analysis, we focus the placebo analysis of mental health outcomes on a subsample limited to mothers who experience a parental or sibling death.…”

The Health Externalities of Downsizing

“…Often they focus on different types of stress, in particular shocks during childhood, such as famines (Lindeboom, Portrait & van den Berg 2010, van den Berg, Pinger & Schoch 2016 or the death of a family member (Persson & Rossin-Slater 2018, Schmidpeter 2019. Another strand of the literature interprets bad economic conditions or import competition as stress and estimates effects on health, both during childhood (van den Berg, Lindeboom & Portrait 2006) and adulthood (e.g., Adda & Fawaz 2020, Johnston et al 2020, Kronenberg & Boehnke 2019, Pierce & Schott 2020, Ruhm 2000.…”

The Long-Term Labor Market Effects of Parental Unemployment

“…Single parents might not readily have a partner or social interactions available, two important factors to deal with high levels of stress (e.g. Schmidpeter, 2019). Therefore, one would expect larger effects for children of single-parent families.…”