Job Displacement and Mortality: An Analysis Using Administrative Data

By D. Sullivan, Till M. von Wachter. 2009

976 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use administrative data on the quarterly employment and earnings of Pennsylvanian workers in the 1970s and 1980s matched to Social Security Administration death records covering 1980–2006 to estimate the effects of job displacement on mortality. We find that for high-seniority male workers, mortality rates in the year after displacement are 50%–100% higher than would otherwise have been expected. The effect on mortality hazards declines sharply over time, but even twenty years after displacement, we estimate a 10%–15% increase in annual death hazards. If such increases were sustained indefinitely, they would imply a loss in life expectancy of 1.0–1.5 years for a worker displaced at age forty. We show that these results are not due to selective displacement of less healthy workers or to unstable industries or firms offering less healthy work environments. We also show that workers with larger losses in earnings tend to suffer greater increases in mortality. This correlation remains when we examine predicted earnings declines based on losses in industry, firm, or firm-size wage premiums.

Subfields: Demography, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/280f80e62d50dce6c58d0e2bf0305467c63838c5

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Citations in the corpus

The individual experience of unemployment. (2012, background): “Sullivan & von Wachter (2009) argue that it is possible for mortality to be elevated among involuntarily displaced individuals and for this trend to be masked in aggregate analyses of mortality levels across the whole population.”
A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Theory (2018, background): “This lower well-being seems to stem from higher anxiety, lower self-esteem, and lower life satisfaction [Darity and Goldsmith, 1996; Krueger and Mueller, 2011; Theodossiou, 1998]. Here we assume that unemployed workers have utility U(cu)− z, where the parameter z captures the nonpecuniary cost of un”
Trade Adjustment: Worker Level Evidence (2014, neutral): “They have in common intensive use of natural resources (land, oil reserves) or physical capital.”