Annika Nielsen (University of Basel)
During the last decades substantial changes in the labor market have had a tremendous impact on the working arrangements of employees. Not only have non-standard working arrangements such as temporary work and part-time jobs gained of importance but the working conditions themselves have undergone major transformations. As a consequence of the decline of manufacturing jobs and the growth of service oriented office work accompanied by employee involvement in decision making the work-related stressors shifted from physical and environmental strains to rather psychological ones. Although employee involvement is often referred to as a way to not only improve organizational performance but also to make employees' lives easier it can be noticed that these changes in the working conditions can also be a burden for affected employees.
The paper examines the effect of innovative work practices on employee health empirically using the waves of 1995 and 2001 of the German socio-economic panel (SOEP). Hereby, several different aspects of workplace innovations such as decision making authority, self dependent work organization, and diversified tasks are taken into account. In order to take objective as well as subjective measures of employee health into consideration sickness days, self-rated health, and satisfaction with health are used to capture the health effect. The research question is approached by applying different panel estimation techniques depending on the scale of the endogenous variable.