EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Onset of Health Problems and the Propensity of Workers to Change Employers and Occupations

Jodi Messer Pelkowski and Mark Berger

Growth and Change, 2003, vol. 34, issue 3, 276-298

Abstract: Although many studies have investigated how poor health affects hours of work and labor force participation, few have examined the extent to which individuals adapt in order to remain in the labor market. Individuals experiencing health problems may move to different types of work in order to remain in the labor force or to reduce the negative labor market consequences of illness. This paper investigates the movement between employers, and among occupation categories when changing employers, using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). One advantage of the HRS is that its questions on life‐cycle employment and health patterns permit a long‐term perspective on job mobility that is unavailable in most other datasets. Workers with health problems are more likely than healthy workers to remain with their current employer than to switch employers. But among those who switch employers, those with health problems are more likely to change broad occupational categories than are healthy workers. While many individuals remain with the same employer after the onset of health problems, many do switch employers and occupations, even in the presence of ADA legislation.

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2257.00219

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:bla:growch:v:34:y:2003:i:3:p:276-298

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0017-4815

Access Statistics for this article

Growth and Change is currently edited by Dan Rickman and Barney Warf

More articles in Growth and Change from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:growch:v:34:y:2003:i:3:p:276-298