The impact of health on wages in Europe – does gender matter?

Lynn Gambin ()

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: The impact of income and earnings on health has been well-examined in the literature while the impact of health on wages has been far less studied. Even rarer in previous work is the possible difference between the influences of health on wages for men versus women. As there is such a divergence between men and women in developed countries regarding both wages and health, studying the interaction of health and wages and how the relationship differs by gender is an important addition to our understanding of the complex relationship between health and labour market outcomes. The analysis draws on individual level data from up to eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). Estimation procedures are applied to unbalanced panels from 14 different countries. The samples consist of employed adults aged 24 to 64 years. The data is used in estimation of Mincer-type wage functions where the natural logarithm of an individual’s hourly wage is function of a number of individual specific characteristics such as age, education, work experience, type of job, and health. Two health variables are included: self-assessed health status and an indicator of chronic illness or disability. The first estimates are obtained from pooled ordinary least squares. Further estimates are obtained from random effects and fixed effects panel models. A genderrelated difference in the association between health and wages has been found in several of the countries examined however; these differences are not the same in magnitude. For a number of countries, there appears to be no significant gender difference. Overall, self-assessed health has greater effects on men’s wages than women’s, while chronic illness appears to be more significant for women. The largest “gender-gap” seems to exist in France, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Keywords: gender; self-assessed health; wages; unbalanced panel; ECHP; Mincer wage equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-06
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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