Economics Meets Mortality [védés előtt]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

This dissertation investigates the intersections between economic conditions and mortality through three empirical chapters, each analysing a distinct facet of how economic instability impacts death outcomes. The first chapter, "The Silent Killer: The Impact of Unemployment on Mortality", leverages rich Hungarian panel microdata from 2004–2016 and employs a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression framework with mass layoffs as an instrument to identify the causal effect of unemployment on mortality. Results indicate that unemployment leads to nine additional deaths per 100,000 people, with pronounced effects among older men and in Northern Hungary. Contextual factors such as suicide, alcohol consumption, and divorces are also examined as potential drivers of the mechanism. The second chapter, "On the Edge of Despair: The Connection Between Unemployment and Suicide", comprises two studies. The first uses global panel data from over 160 countries (2000–2019) to assess the relationship between unemployment and suicide using various econometric methods, specifically pooled OLS, first difference, between and within estimators, and two-way fixed effects (TWFE). The second study focuses on Hungary and investigates whether the Covid-19 pandemic affected the suicide rate of men, applying an interrupted time-series regression (ITS) model from 2009 to 2023. Results suggest that unemployment is positively associated with suicide globally and that the pandemic’s effect on suicide trends in Hungary is nuanced, with deviations that are not fully attributable to Covid-19 alone. The third chapter, "Analysing Covid-19 Death Outcomes: An Ex-Ante Approach", shifts to a macro-comparative perspective. It explores which pre-pandemic indicators best predict Covid-19 mortality across 200+ countries and territories during the first two years of the pandemic. The analysis uses 30 ex-ante economic, health, and social variables. A two-step methodology is applied: Lasso regression for variable selection, followed by OLS for inference. The findings show that healthier nations suffered significantly fewer excess deaths. The final model explains approximately 60% of the variation in cumulative excess deaths, emphasising the predictive power of pre-existing national characteristics. Together, these chapters underline the substantial and enduring influence of economic factors on mortality and call for the integration of public health priorities into economic policymaking.