The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation?

Although it seems evident that occupation affects health, effect estimates are scarce. We use a job characteristics matrix linked to German longitudinal data spanning 26 years to characterise occupations by their physical and psychosocial burdens. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that simultaneously affect health and selection into occupation, we find that manual work and low job control both have a substantial negative effect on health that gets stronger with age. The effects of late-career exposure to high physical demands and low job control are comparable to a health deterioration due to ageing 12 and 19 months, respectively.

Keywords: Health Economics, Labor Economics, Dynamic Panel Data Models

JEL Classification: I0, J0, C23

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Ravesteijn, Bastian and van Kippersluis, Hans and van Doorslaer, Eddy, The Wear and Tear on Health: What is the Role of Occupation? (April 14, 2014). SOEPpaper No. 618, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2424673 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2424673