Does stress shorten your life? Evidence from parental bereavement

Summary

This paper studies how stress affects the mortality risk. Allowing for time-varying treatment effects, I find no impact of stress on the short run mortality risk but a substantially increase the long-run, especially for men. Investigating possible mechanisms, I provide evidence that the utilization of health care, in particular measures related to mental health, dampens the effect of stress for women. For men, my results show only a short-term protective effect. In the long run, my results suggest that they restore to adverse health behaviour in order to deal with stress.