The effect of job quality on health of older workers in Europe

This paper estimates the causal effect of job quality on the physical and mental health of older European workers. We combine longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with occupation- and country-level job-quality measures from the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) for 14 European countries. To address endogenous occupational sorting, we focus on workers who remain within the same 3-digit ISCO occupation across waves, and estimate individual fixed-effects models that exploit exogenous within-occupation changes in working conditions over time. We find that deteriorations in job quality significantly worsen health outcomes. In particular, higher work intensity, poorer working time quality, and weaker job prospects reduce mental health and selected physical health outcomes. Pronounced gender heterogeneity emerges: women’s mental health is more sensitive to changes in work intensity and working time quality, while men’s health is more consistently affected by job discretion, including cardiovascular risk. Institutional context further moderates these effects, with smaller health penalties in countries with stronger healthcare capacity, stricter employment protection, and more comprehensive occupational health and safety regulation. Overall, the findings highlight the role of labour market conditions as causal determinants of health and the importance of integrated policy responses in ageing societies.