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

摘要在过去的四十年中，工作性质的变化对老龄化劳动力的健康和福祉有着重要的影响。本论文将研究工作和健康之间的关系，在生命周期，以更好地了解各种工作条件如何影响健康差距作为工人的年龄。了解与工作相关的途径如何影响员工的健康，对于退休年龄政策、老年劳动力依附以及医疗保险、医疗补助和其他退休人员医疗保健计划的成本具有重要意义。隔离退休前几年工作条件造成的健康趋势是一项挑战：途径难以界定和衡量，大多数研究没有充分处理工作选择与健康之间的选择偏差，因此难以就因果关系得出更有力的结论。研究还表明，体力劳动者的健康状况随着年龄的增长下降得更快，这表明工作条件可能会产生长期或累积的影响。因此，对老年职业健康梯度的任何估计都必须理清工人一生中职业承诺与当前工作需求的累积效应。为了解决由于遗漏变量或选择而导致的工作条件内生性变化的可能性，并隔离同期工作条件对50岁以后健康的影响，本文分析了一个独特而丰富的全国代表性面板数据集，该数据集将老年人的工作条件与工人一生中的健康和收入联系起来。年代的事业。为了改进我们在经济学中衡量工作条件的方式，本文采用了跨学科的方法。流行病学、社会学和职业安全与健康文献中的许多研究表明，工作的物理、环境和社会心理方面都有可能影响健康。特别是，制造业工作岗位的减少和转向服务业工作增加了工作心理压力因素影响健康的可能性。因此，？工作能力?模型，或职业安全与健康文献中研究老龄化与工作的主要模型，被用作指导理论框架，将物理，环境和社会心理工作条件纳入研究。对一套全面的客观工作需求进行纵向分析，有助于更好地了解老年人职业健康梯度的存在和形成。

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