Job insecurity and health: evidence from older European workers

We study the relationship between perceived job insecurity and health using longitudinal data on around 30 thousand older workers from 20 European countries covering a period of 14 years. The unprecedented size and nature of the dataset compared to previous studies on job insecurity and health allow us to apply different estimation methods and compare the results obtained. We do so using a wide range of health measures. Using pooled OLS, we estimate an association between job insecurity and health outcomes. Including several sets of control variables and a fixed effects estimator yields mostly insignificant results with the exception of a few mental health measures. Additionally, we test the robustness of an IV strategy recently proposed in the literature. We cautiously conclude that the direct causal link between job insecurity and health for older workers is weak and discuss several reasons for our findings.