Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: The Impact of Working Conditions on the Health of an Aging Workforce

The New School, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: The Impact of Working Conditions on the Health of an Aging Workforce Abstract The changing nature of work over the past forty years has important implications for the health and well being of an aging workforce. This dissertation will examine the relationship between work and health over the life cycle to better understand how various working conditions influence health disparities as workers age. Understanding how work-related pathways affect health as workers age has important implications for retirement age policies, labor force attachment at older ages, and the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and other retiree health care programs. Isolating trends in health due to working conditions in the years leading up to retirement is challenging: pathways are hard to define and measure and most studies do not adequately deal with the selection bias that occurs between job choice and health, making it difficult to draw stronger conclusions regarding causality. Research has also shown that health depreciates faster with age for individuals in manual occupations, suggesting that working conditions could have long-term or cumulative impacts. Therefore, any estimation of the occupational health gradient at older ages must untangle the cumulative effect of a worker's occupational commitment over their lifetime from current job demands. To address the possibility of endogenous variation in working conditions due to omitted variables or selection and isolate the effect of contemporaneous working conditions on health after age fifty, this dissertation analyzes a unique and rich nationally representative panel dataset that links working conditions at older ages with health and earnings over the course of a worker?s career. To improve how we measure working conditions in economics, this dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach. Much research in the epidemiology, sociology, and occupational safety and health literature has shown that physical, environmental, and psychosocial aspects of work all have the potential to impact health. In particular, the decline in manufacturing jobs and the switch to service jobs has increased the likelihood that psychosocial job stressors affect health. As a result, the ?work ability? model, or the leading model for research on aging and work in the occupational safety and health literature, is used as a guiding theoretical framework to incorporate physical, environmental, and psychosocial working conditions into the study. Longitudinal analysis on a comprehensive set of objective job demands will contribute to a better understanding of the existence and formation of occupational health gradients at older ages.