The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation?
33 Pages Posted: 15 Apr 2014
There are 3 versions of this paper
The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation?
The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation?
The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation?
Date Written: April 14, 2014
Abstract
Although it seems evident that occupation affects health, effect estimates are scarce. We use a job characteristics matrix linked to German longitudinal data spanning 26 years to characterise occupations by their physical and psychosocial burdens. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that simultaneously affect health and selection into occupation, we find that manual work and low job control both have a substantial negative effect on health that gets stronger with age. The effects of late-career exposure to high physical demands and low job control are comparable to a health deterioration due to ageing 12 and 19 months, respectively.
Keywords: Health Economics, Labor Economics, Dynamic Panel Data Models
JEL Classification: I0, J0, C23
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation