IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jku/econwp/2018_11.html

The growing American health penalty: International trends in the employment of older workers with poor health

Author

Listed:
  • Ben Baumberg Geiger
  • René Böheim
  • Thomas Leoni

Abstract

Many countries have reduced the generosity of disability benefits while making them more activating – yet few studies have examined how employment rates have subsequently changed. We present estimates of how the employment rates of older workers with poor health in 13 high-income countries changed between 2004-7 and 2012-15 using HRS/SHARE/ELSA data. We find that those in poor health in the USA have experienced a unique deterioration: they have not only seen a widening gap to the employment rates of those with good health, but their employment rates fell per se. We find only for Sweden (and possibly England) signs that the health employment gap shrank. We then examine possible explanations for the development in the USA: we find no evidence it links to labour market trends, but possible links to the USA’s lack of disability benefit reform – which should be considered alongside the wider challenges of our findings for policymakers.

Suggested Citation

  • Ben Baumberg Geiger & René Böheim & Thomas Leoni, 2018. "The growing American health penalty: International trends in the employment of older workers with poor health," Economics working papers 2018-11, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    • Handle: RePEc:jku:econwp:2018_11
    Note: PDF Document
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.jku.at/papers/2018/wp1811.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. René Böheim & Thomas Horvath & Thomas Leoni & Martin Spielauer, 2023. "The Impact of Health and Education on Labor Force Participation in Aging Societies: Projections for the United States and Germany from Dynamic Microsimulations," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 42(3), pages 1-35, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-Labor Market Discrimination
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jku:econwp:2018_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: René Böheim (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vlinzat.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.