Displaced or Depressed? The Effect of Working in Automatable Jobs on Mental Health

Sylvie Blasco (), Julie Rochut and Bénédicte Rouland
Additional contact information
Sylvie Blasco: University of Caen

No 15434, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Automation may destroy jobs and change the labour demand structure, thereby potentially impacting workers' health and well-being. Using French individual survey data, we estimate the effects of working in automatable jobs on mental health. Implementing propensity score matching to solve the issue of endogenous exposure to automation risk, we find that workers whose job is at risk of automation in the future are about 4 pp more likely to suffer at present from severe mental disorders. Fear of job loss within the year and fear of qualification or occupational changes seem relevant channels to explain our findings.

Keywords: mental health; automation; job insecurity; propensity score matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15434.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp15434

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().