The wear and tear on health: What is the role of occupation?

Bastian Ravesteijn, Hans van Kippersluis and Eddy Van Doorslaer

Health Economics, 2018, vol. 27, issue 2, e69-e86

Abstract: Health is well known to show a clear gradient by occupation. Although it may appear evident that occupation can affect health, there are multiple possible sources of selection that can generate a strong association, other than simply a causal effect of occupation on health. We link job characteristics to German panel data spanning 29 years to characterize occupations by their physical and psychosocial burden. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that simultaneously affect health and selection into occupation, we find that selection into occupation accounts for at least 60% of the association. The effects of occupational characteristics such as physical strain and low job control are negative and increase with age: late‐career exposure to 1 year of high physical strain and low job control is comparable to the average health decline from ageing 16 and 6 months, respectively.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3563

Related works:
Working Paper: The Wear and Tear on Health: What Is the Role of Occupation? (2013)
Working Paper: The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation? (2013)
Working Paper: The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation? (2013)
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:wly:hlthec:v:27:y:2018:i:2:p:e69-e86

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().