Housing , health , Europe , EU-SILC data , fixed-effects model
Abstract:
Deprived housing conditions have long been recognized as a source of poor health. Never-
theless, there is scant empirical evidence of a causal relationship between housing and health.
The literature identifies two different pathways by which housing deprivation affects health,
namely, neighborhood effects and the effects of the individual dwelling unit. However, a
joint examination of both pathways is absent from the literature. Moreover, endogeneity
is a substantial concern in analyses of these two problems. Thus far, studies addressing
endogeneity concerns have done so through experimental design or instrumental variables.
While the first approach suffers from problems of external validity, we demonstrate the sub-
stantial diffculty in identifying robust and reliable instruments for the latter. Consequently,
we adopt an alternative strategy to identify the causal effects of housing on health in 21
European countries by estimating fixed-effect models and considering both sources of endo-
geneity, neighborhoods and dwellings. Furthermore, using the panel dimension of our data,
we reveal the accumulation dynamics of poor housing conditions. Our results indicate that
living in poor housing is the chief socioeconomic determinant of health over the four-year
observation period and that bad housing is a decisive, causal transmission pathway by which
socioeconomic status affects health.
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