Employment status and perceived health condition: longitudinal data from Italy

Abstract

BackgroundThe considerable increase of non-standard labor contracts, unemployment and inactivity rates raises the question of whether job insecurity and the lack of job opportunities affect physical and mental well-being differently from being employed with an open-ended contract. In this paper we offer evidence on the relationship between self-reported health and the employment status in Italy using the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW); another aim is to investigate whether these potential inequalities have changed with the recent economic downturn (time period 2006-2010).MethodsWe estimate an ordered logit model with self-reported health status (SRHS) as response variable based on a fixed-effects approach which has certain advantages with respect to the random-effects formulation: the fixed-effects nature of the model also allows us to solve the problems of incidental parameters and non-random selection of individuals into different labor market categories.ResultsWe find that temporary workers, first-job seekers and unemployed individuals are worse off than permanent employees, especially males, young workers, and those living in the center and south of Italy.ConclusionHealth inequalities between permanent workers and job seekers widen over time for male and young workers, and arise in the north of the country as well.

La medición de la salud en el mercado laboral europeo: una perspectiva de género

“…Aunque estos resultados pueden resultar contradictorios con trabajos previos que demuestran que la salud de los desempleados es más pobre que la de las personas con un trabajo permanente (Urbanos Garrido y López Valcárcel, 2013 y Minelli et al, 2014), hay que tener en cuenta que este estudio aborda las desigualdades en salud con un Indicador Sintético que incluye diversos indicadores relacionados con la salud, las emociones y el estado anímico en el momento de la encuesta. Este hecho, unido a que las personas desempleadas tienen más tiempo que las empleadas para realizar hábitos de tipo saludable como ir al gimnasio o salir a correr, añadido La medición de la salud en el mercado laboral europeo: una perspectiva de género a no verse afectadas por las situaciones de estrés que genera el trabajo, puede explicar parcialmente los resultados.…”

Employment Condition, Economic Deprivation and Self-Evaluated Health in Europe: Evidence from EU-SILC 2009–2012

“…In order to account for time-constant unobserved heterogeneity, possibly correlated with the employment condition, a fixed-effects approach based on information on the transitions of the variables of interest can be adopted, so as to avoid parametric assumptions [5,41]. Unfortunately, the lack of time variation in our variables of interest does not allow us to pursue this kind of strategy.…”

Effect of intergenerational educational mobility on health of Indian women

“…Often researchers have a view that self-reported health is a very subjective measure [ 45 ] and may lead to various response biases, such as, self-reporting is likely to get affected by individual’s perception and interpretation of symptoms and the readiness to report illness in interview [ 46 ]; and cultural differences in readiness to report illness [ 47 ]. However, another school of thought believes the self-reported health as the right way to measure the health of a person as it not only captures biological or physical health but also mental or psychological health of the person [ 48 , 49 ]. Of late, the above mentioned debate is shifting towards self-reported health being a better indicator of overall health status, for example, see Schnittker and Bacak [ 50 ] (and the references therein) which argues that self-reported overall health has better predictive validity.…”