Wages, health and gender: three empirical applications -PhD Thesis-

Publication type

Thesis/Degree/Other Honours

Author

Publication date

June 1, 2006

Abstract:

This thesis explores the relationship between hourly wages and health using samples of working adults in the United Kingdom and a number of European countries. The main objective is to determine whether or not health has an impact upon wages and whether such an impact differs by gender. While much previous work in health and labour has found that health affects worker productivity and the amount of time an individual can work, the difference between men and women in terms of such effects has not been widely analysed.
This analysis extends the existing related work in a number of ways. Firstly, recent and relatively extensive panel data sets and a number of different estimation techniques are used in the analysis. The consideration of various health status indicators is also not typical of most analyses looking at gender wage gaps. Finally, in the third paper of the thesis, the presentation of a number of countries with comparable variable definitions and the same analysis undertaken for each is uncommon in the existing literature.
The first two papers consider gender differences in the effect of health on log hourly wages through estimation of Mincerian wage equations. Unbalanced panels of adults from the British Household Panel Survey and the European Community Household Panel are used in papers 1 and 2, respectively. The third paper examines the contribution of a number of health indicators to the gender gap in log wages and to the level of inequality in wages measured by Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients in a number of European countries. Overall, health is found to have a small impact on the gender gap in log hourly wages and inequality with variations across the countries considered. The particular measure of health used influences which gender experiences the greater impact of health on earnings

Subjects

Notes

not held in Res Lib - bibliographic reference only

#509177

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