Petri Böckerman

Unemployment and Self-Assessed Health: Evidence from Panel Data

We examine the relationship between unemployment and self-assessed health using the European Community Household Panel for Finland over the period 1996-2001. Our results show that the event of becoming unemployed does not matter as such for self-assessed health. The health status of those that end up being unemployed is lower than that of the continually employed. Therefore, persons who have poor health are being selected for the pool of the unemployed. This explains why, in a cross-section, unemployment is associated with poor self-assessed health. All in all, the cross-sectional negative relationship between unemployment and self-assessed health is not found longitudinally.

What makes you work while you are sick? Evidence from a survey of workers

BACKGROUND Sickness absenteeism has been a focus of the EU Labour Force Surveys since the early 1970s. In contrast, sickness presenteeism is a newcomer. Based on surveys, this concept emerged in the empirical literature as late as the 1990s. Knowledge of the determinants of sickness presenteeism is still relatively sparse. METHODS The article examines the prevalence of sickness presenteeism in comparison with sickness absenteeism, using survey data covering 725 Finnish union members in 2008. We estimate logit models. The predictor variables capture working-time arrangements and the rules at the workplace. We include control variables such as the sector of the economy and educational attainment. RESULTS Controlling for worker characteristics, we find that sickness presenteeism is much more sensitive to working-time arrangements than sickness absenteeism is. Permanent full-time work, mismatch between desired and actual working hours, shift or period work and overlong working weeks increase sickness presenteeism. We also find an interesting trade-off between sickness categories: regular overtime decreases sickness absenteeism, but increases sickness presenteeism. CONCLUSIONS Two work-related sickness categories, absenteeism and presenteeism, are counterparts. However, the explanations for their prevalence point to different factors.

Job Disamenities, Job Satisfaction, Quit Intentions, and Actual Separations: Putting the Pieces Together

We analyze the potential role of adverse working conditions at the workplace in the determination of employees’ quit behavior. Our data contain both detailed information on perceived job disamenities, job satisfaction, and quit intentions from a cross-section survey and information on employees’ actual job switches from longitudinal register data that can be linked to the survey. Reduced-form models show that employees facing adverse working conditions tend to have greater intentions to switch jobs and search for new matches more frequently. Multivariate probit models point out that job dissatisfaction that arises in adverse working conditions is related to job search and this in turn is related to actual job switches.

The job satisfaction-productivity nexus: A study using matched survey and register data

The authors examine the role of employee job satisfaction in Finnish manufacturing plants over the period 1996–2001 to determine the extent to which it affects establishment-level productivity. Using matched data on job satisfaction from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and information on establishment productivity from longitudinal register data linked to the ECHP, they estimate that the effect of an increase in the establishment’s average level of employee job satisfaction on productivity is positive, but its magnitude varies depending on the specification of the model. The authors use an instrumental variables point estimate and find that an increase in the measure of job satisfaction by one within-plant standard deviation increases value-added per hours worked in manufacturing by 6.6%.

Obesity and labour market success in Finland: The difference between having a high BMI and being fat

This paper examines the relationship between obesity and labour market success in Finland, using various indicators of individual body composition along with body mass index (BMI). Weight, height, fat mass and waist circumference are measured by health professionals. We find that only waist circumference has a negative association with wages for women, whereas no obesity measure is significant in the linear wage models for men. However, all measures of obesity are negatively associated with womens employment probability and fat mass is negatively associated with mens employment probability. We also find that the use of categories for waist circumference and fat mass has a substantial influence on the results. For example, the category for high fat mass is associated with roughly 5.5% lower wages for men. All in all, the results indicate that in the absence of measures of body composition, there is a risk that labour market penalties associated with obesity are measured with bias.

Interaction of working conditions, job satisfaction, and sickness absences: Evidence from a representative sample of employees

We study the predictors of sickness absences among 2800 Finnish workers responding to the cross-sectional Quality of Work Life Survey in 1997. The data contain detailed information on the prevalence of adverse working conditions at the workplace from a representative sample of wage and salary earners. We show by using recursive multivariate models that the prevalence of harms at the workplace is associated with job dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction with sickness absences. The policy lesson is that the improvement of working conditions should be an integral part of any scheme aimed at decreasing sickness absence.

Perception of Job Instability in Europe

The perception of job instability is an important measure of subjective well being of individuals, because most people derive their income from selling their labour services. The study explores the determination of perception of job instability in Europe. The study is based on a large-scale survey from the year 1998. There are evidently large differences in the amount of perceived job instability from country to country. The lowest level of perceived job instability is in Denmark (9%). In contrast, the highest level of perceived job instability is in Spain (63%). Perceived job instability increases with age and an earlier unemployment episode. An increase in educational level, on the other hand, leads to a decline in the perception of job instability. In addition, a temporary contract as such does not yield an additional increase to the perception of job instability. The perception of job instability is more common within manufacturing industries and there is some evidence for the view that it increases according to the size of the firm.

Erosion of the Ghent System and Union Membership Decline: Lessons from Finland

Union density declined in Finland by more than 10 percentage points in less than 10 years. This paper analyses the reasons behind the decline, using micro data from the 1990s. According to our results, the changes in the composition of the labour force and the changes in the labour market explain only about a quarter of this decline. The main reason for the decline appears to be the erosion of the Ghent system, due to the emergence of an independent unemployment insurance fund that provides unemployment insurance without requiring union membership. We also find that the decline in the union density can be attributed to the declining inclination of the cohorts born after the early 1960s to become union members.

Alcohol-related mortality, drinking behavior, and business cycles

This paper explores the connection between alcohol-related mortality, drinking behavior, and macroeconomic conditions in Finland using both aggregate and microlevel data from recent decades. The aggregate data reveal that an improvement in economic conditions produces a decrease in alcohol-related mortality. Microlevel data show that alcohol consumption increases during economic expansion while the probability of being a drinker remains unchanged. This demonstrates that alcohol-related mortality and self-reported alcohol consumption may be delinked in the short-run business cycle context. One explanation for this paradox is that most harmful forms of drinking are not captured in survey-based data used to study the effect of macroeconomic conditions on alcohol consumption. Our evidence does not overwhelmingly support the conclusions reported for the United States that temporary economic downturns are good for health.

Do job disamenities raise wages or ruin job satisfaction

This study investigates the role of adverse working conditions in the determination of individual wages and overall job satisfaction in the Finnish labour market. The potential influence of adverse working conditions on self-reported fairness of pay at the workplace is considered as an alternative, indirect measure of job satisfaction. The results show that working conditions have a very minor role in the determination of individual wages in the Finnish labour market. In contrast, adverse working conditions substantially increase the level of job dissatisfaction and the perception of unfairness of pay at the workplace.