I use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to estimate the effect of job loss on health for near elderly employees. Job loss is a major cause of economic insecurity for working age individuals, and can cause reduction in income, and loss of health insurance. To control for possible reverse causality, this study focuses on people who were laid off for an exogenous reason - the closure of their previous employers’ business. I find that the unemployed are in worse health than employees, and that health reasons are a common cause of job termination. In contrast, I find no causal effect of exogenous job loss on various measures of health. This suggests that the inferior health of the unemployed compared to the employed could be explained by reverse causality. I also use instrumental variable regression to estimate the effect of loss of health insurance, loss of income, and re-employment on health, and again find no statistically significant effects.
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Paper provided by Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging (MEA), University of Mannheim in its series MEA discussion paper series with number
08163.
Length: Date of creation: 19 Aug 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:mea:meawpa:08163
Contact details of provider: Postal: MEA - Mannheimer Forschungsinstitut Ökonomie und Demographischer Wandel, L13, 17, University of Mannheim, 68131 Mannheim Phone: +49/621/181.1862 Fax: +49/621/181.1863 Web page: http://www.mea.uni-mannheim.de/
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Jonathan Meer & Douglas L. Miller & Harvey S. Rosen, 2003.
"Exploring the Health-Wealth Nexus,"
NBER Working Papers
9554, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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