New evidence on mental health and housing affordability in cities: A quantile regression approach

Abstract

Unaffordable housing costs are one of the most pressing issues facing our cities, affecting people's health in difficult to measure ways. People's health varies over time and dynamically interacts with experiences of housing. Longitudinal analyses rarely explicitly model these variations. Quantile regression is an underutilised tool for testing associations across the distribution of an outcome. In this paper we apply panel quantile regression to test whether cumulative exposure to unaffordable housing over time has differential impact on mental health, dependent on initial health status. Using an annual longitudinal sample of 20,906 urban Australians (2001–2016), we model mental health outc..