The ‘healthy worker effect’: do healthy people climb the occupational ladder?

Joan Costa-Font and Martin Ljunge

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The association between occupational status and health has been taken to reveal the presence of health inequalities shaped by occupational status. However, that interpretation assumes no influence of health status in explaining occupational standing. This paper documents evidence of non-negligible returns to occupation status on health (which we refer as ‘healthy worker effect’). We use a unique empirical strategy that addressed reverse causality, namely an instrumental variable strategy using the variation in average health in the migrant’s country of origin, a health measure plausibly not determined by the migrant’s occupational status. Our findings suggest that health status exerts significant effects on occupational status in several dimensions; having a supervising role, worker autonomy, and worker influence. The effect size of health is larger than that of an upper secondary education.

Keywords: occupational status; self-reported health; immigrants; work autonomy; supervising role (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 J5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Economics and Human Biology, 1, February, 2018, 28, pp. 119-131. ISSN: 1570-677X

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/86471/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The ‘healthy worker effect’: Do healthy people climb the occupational ladder? (2018)
Working Paper: The 'Healthy Worker Effect': Do Healthy People Climb the Occupational Ladder? (2017)
Working Paper: The ‘Healthy Worker Effect’: Do Healthy People Climb the Occupational Ladder? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:86471

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