This paper estimates the causal effect of perceived job insecurity - that is, the fear of involuntary job loss - on health in a sample of men from 22 European countries. We rely on an original instrumental variable approach on the basis of the idea that workers perceive greater job security in countries where employment is strongly protected by the law and more so if employed in industries where employment protection legislation is more binding; that is, in induastries with a higher natural rate of dismissals. Using cross-country data from the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey, we show that, when the potential endogeneity of job insecurity is not accounted for, the latter appears to deteriorate almost all health outcomes. When tackling the endogeneity issue by estimating an instrumental variable model and dealing with potential weak-instrument issues, the health-damaging effect of job insecurity is confirmed for a limited subgroup of health outcomes; namely, suffering from headaches or eyestrain and skin problems. As for other health variables, the impact of job insecurity appears to be insignificant at conventional levels.

This paper estimates the causal impact of retirement on the Body Mass Index (BMI) of adults aged 50-69 years old, on the probability of being either overweight or obese and on the probability of being obese. Based on the 2004, 2006 and 2010-2011 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), our identification strategy exploits variation in European Early Retirement Ages (ERAs) and stepwise increases in ERAs in Austria and Italy between 2004 and 2011 to examine an exogenous shock to retirement behavior. Our results show that retirement induced by discontinuous incentives in early retirement schemes causes a 12-percentage point increase in the probability of being obese among men within a two- to four-year period. We find that the impact of retirement is highly non-linear and mostly affects the right-hand side of the male BMI distribution. Additional results show that this pattern is driven by men retiring from strenuous jobs and by those who were already at risk of obesity. In contrast, no significant results are found among women.

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