“Abstract: … We use our results to assess the long-run effects of the COVID-19 economic recession on mortality and life expectancy. We estimate the size of the COVID-19-related unemployment shock to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, depending on race and gender, resulting in a significant increase in mortality rates and drop in life expectancy. We also predict that the shock will disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while the effects for white men will unfold over longer horizons. These figures translate in more than 0.8 million additional deaths over the next 15 years.
4.1 Effects on life expectancy and death rates…
Table 6 reports the cumulative effect of the COVID-19 unemployment shock on life expectancy and death rates as predicted by our model at different horizons. The first row in each panel of Table 6 reports the results for the overall population. At the 15-year horizon, the death rate is 2.43% higher and life expectancy is 0.83% lower. These numbers represent the marginal effect of the shock: they indicate the expected change in life expectancy and death rates following the COVID-19 unemployment shock keeping fixed other factors that affect these measures of well-being, like the progress in health care.”
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