Does unemployment lead to a less healthy lifestyle?

ABSTRACT

In this article, we use 22 years of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and information on plant closures to investigate the effects of unemployment on four indicators of unhealthy lifestyles: diet, alcohol consumption, smoking and (a lack of) physical activity. In contrast to much of the existing literature, which unlike our analysis is unable to assess causality, our results provide little evidence that unemployment gives rise to unhealthy lifestyles.

KEYWORDS:

• Smoking
• alcohol consumption
• physical activity
• diet

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• B23
• I12
• J64

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Thus, for example, a job loss can be assumed to have a direct (negative) income effect. If we controlled for income in period t rather than t − 1, our income variable might be correlated with the job loss variable, making it impossible to assess the causal impact of (exogenous) unemployment on health behavior.

² Regular smokers consumed around 15 tobacco units per day.

³ To test for the possible anticipation of a plant closure, we match people experiencing a plant closure in t + 1 with employees that remain employed in t + 1 based on a set of observables other than lifestyle. We find no significant difference in the means of the four lifestyle variables in period t.

⁴ See http://www.gesundheitliche-chancengleichheit.de.