Does stress shorten your life? : evidence from parental bereavement

In the third Chapter "Does Stress Shorten Your Life? Evidence from Parental Bereavement", I investigate the effect of stress on the mortality of parents using a child's death as the triggering event. This chapter is a completely revised version of my earlier work "The Fatal Consequences of Grief". Employing a propensity score weighted Kaplan-Meier Estimator I find a non-monotonic relationship between elapsed time since the stressful event and mortality risk. Exploring the main reasons, my results show that especially men tend to adopt adverse health behavior as a reaction to stress. The estimates for women are inconclusive. Checking the importance of possible mediating channels I find that stress induced changes in labor market outcomes can only explain a minor part of the long-term mortality risk for men.