The Wear and Tear on Health: What Is the Role of Occupation?

Abstract

Although it seems evident that occupation affects health, effect estimates are scarce. We use a job characteristics matrix linked to German longitudinal data spanning 26 years to characterize occupations by their physical and psychosocial burdens. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that simultaneously affect health and selection into occupation, we find that manual work and low job control both have a substantial negative effect on health that gets stronger with age. The effects of late-career exposure to high physical demands and low job control are comparable to a health deterioration due to aging 12 and 19 months, respectively.