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The European Journal of Health Economics
Published in: The European Journal of Health Economics 1/2008

01-02-2008 | Original Paper

Work environment satisfaction and employee health: panel evidence from Denmark, France and Spain, 1994–2001

Authors: Nabanita Datta Gupta, Nicolai Kristensen

Published in: The European Journal of Health Economics | Issue 1/2008

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Abstract

This paper investigates whether a satisfactory work environment can promote employee health even after controlling for socioeconomic status and life style factors. A dynamic panel model of health is estimated from worker samples from Denmark, France and Spain, employing both self-assessed general health and the presence of a functional limitation. In all three countries and for both types of health measures, a good perceived work environment is found to be a highly significant determinant of worker health even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and minimizing reverse causality. The marginal effect is, however, larger in France and Denmark than in Spain. Several potential explanations for this finding are discussed. Further, a satisfactory working environment is found to be at least as important for employee health as socioeconomic status. Thus, investing in giving workers a satisfying work environment could be a low-cost way of improving employee health.
Footnotes
1
One of the early investigations in this area was the Whitehall study of the effect of job strain on CHD of British civil servants.
 
2
This measure of health care access is most strongly correlated with GDP per capita in purchasing parities (r = 0.74); see Alber and Köhler [1].
 
3
See the SHARE project, Börsch-Supan A, Brugiavini A, Jüerges H, Mackenbach J, Siegrist J, and Weber G (2005) Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe—first results from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, Mannheim, MEA.
 
4
The work environment measure is linearized by applying the conditional means approach advocated by van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell [22], scaled such that positive values reflect higher satisfaction.
 
5
Dummy variables for missing observations in sector, firm size, occupation, industry, tenure and immigrant status are also included in the estimation but suppressed in the output. Mundlak terms capturing the correlation between the individual-specific effect and time-varying variables are included. The Mundlak terms can be thought of as representing a permanent change in the relevant variable, i.e. the level effect while the time-varying variable captures a transient change or shock effect.
 
6
In some earlier investigations on the same sample (not reported here), we conducted some variable addition tests of attrition following Verbeek and Nijman [25] and found evidence that work environment effects on health were even stronger (though not always significant) when indicators of being present in the next wave, being present in all waves, and a count of the total number of periods observed per individual were interacted with work environment.
 
7
These results are available on request.
 
8
The estimated impact of satisfaction with the work environment in Denmark hardly changes at all following the inclusion of lifestyle factors in either the ADL or the SAH specification. In Spain, the estimated coefficient is 0.077 (0.023) without and 0.081 (0.023) with lifestyle factors under ADL, and unchanged under SAH.
 
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Metadata
Title
Work environment satisfaction and employee health: panel evidence from Denmark, France and Spain, 1994–2001
Authors
Nabanita Datta Gupta
Nicolai Kristensen
Publication date
01-02-2008
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Published in
The European Journal of Health Economics / Issue 1/2008
Print ISSN: 1618-7598
Electronic ISSN: 1618-7601
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-007-0037-6

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