Measuring Occupational Health Inequality in the US, 2008-Present

Gregory Jolivet and Fabien Postel-Vinay

Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: We combine data from O*NET and the CPS to analyze changes in the distribution of job health contents in the United States over the past 18 years. We find that the labor market has been moving toward more stressful and psychologically demanding jobs but also toward jobs with more decision latitude. These changes occurred mostly within occupations, rather than resulting from worker reallocation across occupations. Using the structure of a generic job search model, we estimate workers' Marginal Willingness to Pay (MWP) for various job health attributes over time. We uncover significantly negative preferences for psychological demands from the mid-2010s onwards. At the same time, we find that workers increasingly value decision latitude over time. We use our structural estimates to document the role of occupational health in the dynamics of welfare inequalities across workers as well as between men and women.

Date: 2026
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