The Impact of Chernobyl on Health and Labour Market Performance

Hartmut Lehmann () and Jonathan Wadsworth

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Using longitudinal data from Ukraine we examine the extent of any long-lasting effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce. The variation in the local area level of radiation fallout from the Chernobyl accident is considered as a random exogenous shock with which to try to establish its causal impact on poor health, labour force participation, hours worked and wages. There appears to be a significant positive association between local area-level radiation dosage and perception of poor health, though much weaker associations between local area-level dosage and other specific self-reported health conditions. There is also some evidence to suggest that those more exposed to Chernobyl-induced radiation have significantly lower levels of labour market performance twenty years on.

Keywords: Chernobyl; health; labour market performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H00 J00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1052.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of Chernobyl on health and labour market performance (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1052

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().