The Impact of Education and Occupation on Temporary and Permanent Work Incapacity

Nabanita Datta Gupta, Daniel Lau and Dario Pozzoli
Additional contact information
Daniel Lau: Cornell University, USA

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University

Abstract: This paper investigates whether education and working in a physically demanding job causally impact temporary work incapacity, i.e. sickness absence, and permanent work incapacity, i.e. the inflow to disability via sickness absence. Our contribution is to allow endogeneity of both education and occupation by estimating a quasi-maximum-likelihood discrete factor model. Data on sickness absence and disability spells for the population of older workers come from the Danish administrative registers for 1998-2002. We generally find an independent role of both education and occupation on temporary work incapacity only. Having at least primary education reduces women's (men's) probability of temporary work incapacity by 16% (38%) while working in a physically demanding job increases it by 37% (26%). On the other hand, conditional on sickness absence, the effects of education and occupation on permanent work incapacity are generally insignificant.

Keywords: Work incapacity; education; occupation; factor analysis; discrete factor model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 C35 I12 I20 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49
Date: 2012-11-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.econ.au.dk/repec/afn/wp/12/wp12_25.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Education and Occupation on Temporary and Permanent Work Incapacity (2016)
Working Paper: The Impact of Education and Occupation on Temporary and Permanent Work Incapacity (2012)
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:aah:aarhec:2012-25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().