Workers' health and social relations in Italy

The paper investigates whether social relations are associated with the health of workers after controlling for demographic and worker characteristics, housing features, neighbourhood quality, size of municipality and regional dummies. We consider two aspects of social relationships: i) individual social relations that we proxy by the frequency of meetings with friends, and; ii) contextual social relations, the average frequency with which people meet friends at the community level. A Heckman selection model is estimated from the worker sample, employing both self-reported and objective health measures using new data from an income and living conditions survey carried out in 2006 by the Italian Statistics Office (ITSILC). Results show that social relations at the individual level are positively correlated with self-perceived health, negatively associated with chronic condition but not related to limitations in daily activities. Contextual social relations are negatively linked with chronic condition and limitations in daily activities but not correlated with self-perceived health.