Unemployment and Health: A Meta-Analysis

No 15433, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper is a meta-analysis on the relationship between unemployment and health. Our meta-dataset is made up of 327 study results coming from 65 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 1990 and 2021. We find that publication bias is important, but only for those study results obtained through difference-in-differences or instrumental variables estimators. The average effect of unemployment on health is negative, but small in terms of partial correlation coefficient. We investigate if findings are heterogeneous among several research dimensions. We find that unemployment is mostly effective on the psychological domains of health and that short- and long-term unemployment spells equally affect health. Dealing with endogeneity issues is important and, when this is done, the unemployment effects on health are closer to be nil.

Keywords: unemployment; health; meta-analysis; meta-regression; publication bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C52 I10 I12 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Forthcoming - published in: Journal of Economic Surveys, 2024, 38 (4), 1437-1472

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15433.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unemployment and health: A meta‐analysis (2024)
Working Paper: UNEMPLOYMENT AND HEALTH: A META-ANALYSIS (2022)
Working Paper: Unemployment and Health: A Meta-Analysis (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15433

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().