Socioeconomic determinants of mortality in Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Pedro Alves Santos Paiva
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/133146
• topic: Early mortality; Labor market; Public policy; Poverty; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

In this paper, we study the relation between mortality in the working population and socioeconomic characteristics. We use administrative data on all deaths that occurred in Portugal between 1996 and 2018 and the linked employer-employee dataset which covers the universe of private sector employees. We match the two datasets using discrete cells based on year, gender, commuting zone, birth cohort and profession. We then instrument real hourly wages and employment growth on two instrumental variables, both based on fixed labor market structures, to estimate their effect on age of death. We find negative impacts of real hourly wage decreases on age of death among working individuals, suggesting that each p.p. decrease in real hourly earnings, in the last3 years, anticipates age of death by 3 months, on average. We also find that each p.p. increase in employment growth rates, in the last 3 years, increases age of death by approximately 9 days.