Social Capital Externalities and Individual Mortality Risks in Swedish Municipalities
- Presenter:
Chair: Richard Scheffler; Discussant: Chris Seplaki Mon June 5, 2006 15:30-17:00 Room 313
Rationale: Social interaction in various forms and degrees is common to all economic agents and externalities are a fundamental aspect of a modern interdependent society. As a societal characteristic the effects of social capital have been hypothesized to influence society in a multitude of ways, including health. Evidence has been found that the community social capital is important to individual health. If such a societal externality exists then this may have important implications for health policy.
Objectives: To analyze community social capital externalities on individual’s all-cause and cause-specific mortality risk in Swedish municipalities.
Methodology: Envisaged from conventional economic premises, this paper proposes a mechanism where social capital can be thought as aggregate factor of health production in a community which generates production externalities for the individuals live in the same community and explores the relationship within established paradigm of the Grossman model (Grossman, 1972). The study uses pooled data from Statistic Sweden’s Survey of Living Conditions (the ULF survey) from the annual interviews conducted in 1980-1997 for all the subjects aged 20-84 years who were followed up for 4-21 years. Two municipality social capital indicators- registered election-participation rates and registered crime rates are used to measure area level social capital. We estimate social capital impact of the mortality risk, controlling for the individual’s initial health status and a number of exogenous individual characteristics using extended Cox model (with time-varying covariates). A number of sensitivity analyses are performed with respect to different specifications. We also include additional macro variables such as municipality level income, urbanization, income inequality (estimated by the Gini coefficient) and aggregate level of education as potentially can confound the association between municipality social capital and mortality risk.
Results: Our results suggest that both municipality social capital indicators are significantly influence individual’s risk form all-cause mortality for males but not for females. In an analysis of cause-specific mortality, results indicate that higher rate of election-participation significantly decrease the risk of mortality from cancer and favorable effects are also noticed (but not significant at 5% level) on cardiovascular mortality or deaths due to ‘suicide’ or ‘other external causes’ (motor vehicle accidents, accidents and homicides). Analogous results are also observed for the crime rates indicator. The results are evident and robust to the alternative specifications tried in the sensitivity analysis for individual’s age 65 years or more.
Conclusions: We conclude that municipality social capital has spillover effects on mortality risk over and above individual personal characteristics for elderly population.
