The impact of health on wages in Europe – does gender matter?
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.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York in its series Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers with number 05/03.Length:
Date of creation: Jun 2005
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:yor:hectdg:05/03
Contact details of provider:
Postal: HEDG/HERC, Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom
Phone: (0)1904 323776
Fax: (0)1904 323759
Email:
Web page: http://www.york.ac.uk/res/herc/research/hedg/
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords: gender; self-assessed health; wages; unbalanced panel; ECHP; Mincer wage equation;References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Robert Jäckle & Oliver Himmler, 2010.
"Health and Wages: Panel Data Estimates Considering Selection and Endogeneity,"
Journal of Human Resources,
University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 45(2).
- Robert Jäckle, 2007. "Health and Wages - Panel data estimates considering selection and endogeneity," Ifo Working Paper Series Ifo Working Paper No. 43, Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
- Jäckle, Robert & Himmler, Oliver, 2007. "Health and Wages - Panel data estimates considering selection and endogeneity," MPRA Paper 11578, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Nov 2008.
- Andrew M. Jones & Eddy van Doorslaer & Teresa Bago d'Uva & Silvia Balia & Lynn Gambin & Cristina Hernández Quevedo & Xander Koolman & Nigel Rice, 2006. "Health and Wealth: Empirical Findings and Political Consequences," Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, Verein für Socialpolitik, vol. 7(s1), pages 93-112, 05.
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:yor:hectdg:05/03For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Jane Rawlings).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

