From CBC.ca:

A new paper by two American economists suggests people who lose their jobs may be at risk of premature death. 

Economists tracked the lives of more than 20,000 workers in Pennsylvania over a 30-year period, including 7,000 employees who lost their jobs in mass layoffs.

They looked at the number of deaths for these laid-off workers up until 20 years after job loss and compared their mortality to that of similar employees who did not lose their job.

"The bottom line is that large mass layoffs that lead to large earnings losses will increase mortality of the affected workers 10 to 20 per cent a year. That leads to a loss of life expectancy of one to two years," said Till von Wachter, a labour economist at Columbia University, which conducted the study with the U.S. Federal Reserve.