Nursing Homes and Mortality in Europe: Uncertain Causality

Résumé

Using matching methods, we want to check whether nursing home were lending themselves to excess mortality even before the pandemic. Controlling for a number of characteristics (age, gender, degree of dependence, state of health and resources) of the elderly population in and outside nursing homes, we conjecture that the difference in mortality, if any, between those two samples is to be attributed to the way nursing homes are designed and organized. We observe excess mortality in Central and Eastern European countries but not elsewhere. This raises the question of the organization and management of these nursing homes, but also of their design and financing.