Costa-Font Joan, Ljunge Martin
London School of Economics, Department of Health Policy, Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE, London, England, UK.
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Box 55665, 102 85, Stockholm, Sweden.
Econ Hum Biol. 2018 Feb;28:119-131. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2017.12.007. Epub 2018 Jan 9.
The association between occupational status and health has been taken to reveal the presence of occupational health inequalities. However, that interpretation assumes no influence of health status in climbing the occupational ladder. This paper documents evidence of non-negligible returns to occupation status on health (which we refer as 'healthy worker effect'). We use a unique empirical strategy that addresses the problem of reverse causality. That is, an instrumental variable strategy using the variation in average health in the migrant's country of origin, a health measure plausibly not determined by the migrant's occupational status. Our findings suggest that health status exerts significant effects on occupational status in several dimensions; including having a supervising role, worker autonomy, and worker influence. The effect size of health is larger than that of an upper secondary education.
职业地位与健康之间的关联已被用来揭示职业健康不平等的存在。然而，这种解释假定健康状况对职业晋升没有影响。本文记录了职业地位对健康产生不可忽视回报的证据（我们将其称为“健康工人效应”）。我们采用了一种独特的实证策略来解决反向因果关系问题。也就是说，采用一种工具变量策略，利用移民原籍国的平均健康状况差异，这一健康指标似乎并非由移民的职业地位所决定。我们的研究结果表明，健康状况在多个维度上对职业地位产生显著影响；包括担任监督角色、工作自主性和工人影响力。健康的影响大小大于接受高中以上教育的影响。
