2025/02/14 by Timothy Ludlow, Jonas Fooken, Christiern Rose +1 · 1 voice
Health Professions · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Business, Management and Accounting · #Employment and Welfare Studies #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism #Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis
paper · doi:10.1016/j.ehb.2025.101475
openalex publication_date 2025/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/11
We examine the impact of housing insecurity on mental health. We use missed rental payments due to a shortage of money as a direct measure of housing insecurity and a difference-in-differences framework that allows us to differentiate the effect of housing insecurity from the effect of experiencing financial hardship more generally. We find that housing insecurity causes a decline in mental health. Further analysis reveals two important dimensions of heterogeneity: the duration of prior financial hardship and the intensity of housing insecurity. Renters in prolonged financial hardship and those who experience high levels of housing insecurity (defined as missing a rental payment and having a high rent to income ratio), experience the largest negative impacts on their mental health.