Job Loss, Unemployment Insurance, and Health: Evidence from Brazil

Guilherme Amorim (), Diogo Britto (), Alexandre Fonseca () and Breno Sampaio
Additional contact information
Guilherme Amorim: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Diogo Britto: University of Milan Bicocca
Alexandre Fonseca: Federal Revenue of Brazil

No 16790, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the effects of job loss and unemployment insurance (UI) on health among Brazilian workers. We construct a novel dataset linking individual-level administrative records on employment, hospital discharges, and mortality for a 17-year period, rarely available in the context of developing countries. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we find that job loss increases hospitalization (+33%) and mortality risks (+23%) for male workers, while women are not affected. These effects are pervasive over the distribution of age, tenure, income and education, and men's children are also negatively affected. Remarkably, about half of these impacts are driven by external causes associated with accidents and the violent Brazilian context. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that access to UI partially mitigates the adverse effects of job loss on health. Our results indicate that the health costs of job loss are only partially explained by the income losses associated with job displacement.

Keywords: job loss; unemployment insurance; hospitalization; deaths (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J63 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 69 pages
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hea, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16790.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Job Loss, Unemployment Insurance and Health: Evidence from Brazil (2022)
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:iza:izadps:dp16790

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().