Unemployment and self-assessed health: Evidence from panel data

Petri Böckerman () and Pekka Ilmakunnas ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We analyse the relationship between unemployment and self-assessed health using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for Finland over the period 1996-2001. Our results reveal that the event of becoming unemployed does not matter as such for self-assessed health. The health status of those that end up being unemployed is lower than that of the continually employed. Hence, persons who have poor health are being selected for the pool of the unemployed. This explains why, in a cross-section, unemployment is associated with poor self-assessed health. However, we are somewhat more likely to obtain the negative effects of unemployment on health when long-term unemployment is used as the measure of unemployment experience.

Keywords: health; subjective well-being; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Date: Written 2007-02-12
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1798/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Address: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ekkehart Schlicht ().