TY  - JOUR
AU  - Currie,Janet
AU  - Tekin,Erdal
TI  - Is the Foreclosure Crisis Making Us Sick?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17310
PY  - 2011
Y2  - August 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17310
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17310.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Janet Currie
Princeton University
316 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609-258-7393
Fax: 609-258-5974
E-Mail: jcurrie@princeton.edu

Erdal Tekin
Department of Economics
Andrew Young School of Policy Studies
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3992
Atlanta, GA 30302-3992
Tel: 404/413-0163
Fax: 404/413-0145
E-Mail: tekin@gsu.edu
AB  - We investigate the relationship between foreclosure activity and the health of residents using zip code level longitudinal data. We focus on Arizona, California, Florida, and New Jersey, four states that have been among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. We combine foreclosure data for 2005 to 2009 from RealtyTrac with data on emergency room visits and hospital discharges.  Our zip code level quarterly data allow us to control for many potential confounding factors through the inclusion of fixed effects for each zip code as well as for each combination of county, quarter, and year.  We find that an increase in the number of foreclosures is associated with increases in medical visits for mental health (anxiety and suicide attempts), for preventable conditions (such as hypertension), and for a broad array of physical complaints that are plausibly stress-related.  They are not related to visits for cancer morbidity, which arguably should not respond as rapidly to stress.  Foreclosures also have a zero or negative effect on elective procedures, as one might expect.  Age specific results suggest that the foreclosure crisis is having its most harmful effects on individuals 20 to 49.  We also find that larger effects for African-Americans and Hispanics than for whites, consistent with the perception that minorities have been particularly hard hit.
ER  -