Housing Wealth, Health and Deaths of Despair

Abstract

We use household-level data to study the causal effects of exogenous changes in housing wealth on health and the drug crisis in the US attributed to “deaths of despair”. We find that a one standard deviation positive shock in housing wealth increases the probability of an improvement in self-reported health (mental health) by 1.0 (1.10) percentage points, decreases the change in drug-related mortality rate by 4.3%, and has no effect on alcohol- or suicide-related deaths. The opposite effect also holds, such that a negative shock on wealth increases the probability of a decline in health. We also find that the impact of housing wealth on health varies across socioeconomic groups and is more pronounced in MSAs in which housing supply is more inelastic, which explains the differential effect of economic cycles across geographical areas. Our results suggest that housing-related policies could have important implications for general health outcomes as well as for the opioid crisis.