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Impact of unemployment on self-perceived health

Evidence from French panel data

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Abstract

This article investigates the impact of unemployment on self-perceived health using the French Longitudinal Labour Force Survey over the period 2013–2016. We apply a difference-in-difference propensity score matching approach to identify the health effect of unemployment. By combining both methods, we minimise selection bias and remove unobserved individual fixed effects that are time-invariant as well as common period effects. In the French context, characterised by high and persistent unemployment and relatively long unemployment spells, we show that the experience of unemployment has no significant effect on self-perceived health. Moreover, we find no heterogenous effect by carrying out separate analyses by age, gender, marital status, education, occupation, employment contract, local unemployment rate, or past labour market history. Robustness checks, performed by testing alternative types of matching technology, different definitions of the unemployment experience, and other measures of health confirm our findings. Health selection and confounding factors appear to be important determinants of the cross-sectional association between unemployment and poor health.

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Notes

  1. We have reversed the scale of the health measure in the LFS in such a way that higher values correspond to better health.

  2. Note that t refers to the first interview and \(t+1\) to the sixth interview, 15 months later.

  3. This implies that selection into treatment is solely based on observable characteristics.

  4. Observations are divided into 15 strata. We control that, within each block, the means of the propensity score in the two groups (\(D=0\) and \(D=1\)) are not statistically different.

  5. More precisely, implementing the common support condition leads us to discard 3 observations in the treatment group and 6 in the control group.

  6. Note that estimates with nearest-neighbour matching and Caliper matching provide similar results.

  7. We performed separate estimations with different age thresholds and various age groups. All the estimated ATTs were non-significant.

  8. We also performed separate estimations with three different status (single, couple, and married) with similar results.

  9. We determine the optimal caliper width following the work of Austin [1].

  10. In this robustness check, we consider that “activity limitations” is a dummy variable that equals 1 if the individual is “severely limited” or “limited but not severely”, and 0 otherwise.

  11. Note that very few workers enter unemployment due to plant closure in France, compared to what is observed in Germany and the USA. Therefore, the non-significance of the ATT might be due to the small size of the treatment sample.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GAINS - University of Le Mans, Avenue Olivier Messiaen, 72085, Le Mans, France

    Jérôme Ronchetti

  2. GATE - University of Lyon II, 93 Chemin des Mouilles, 69130, Écully, France

    Anthony Terriau

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  1. Jérôme Ronchetti
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  2. Anthony Terriau
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Correspondence to Anthony Terriau.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5 and 6.

Table 4 Conditional average treatment effect on the treated
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Table 5 Alternative outcomes
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Table 6 Alternative treatments
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Ronchetti, J., Terriau, A. Impact of unemployment on self-perceived health. Eur J Health Econ 20, 879–889 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-019-01050-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-019-01050-5

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