Health Status and Labour Force Participation

This project is being conducted as part of a larger research program titled, 'The Dynamics of Economic and Social Change: An Analysis of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey'.

Its main objective is to use the HILDA Survey data to measure the direction and strength of the association between self-reported health status and labour force participation. The project initially used data from wave 1 and focused on the potential endogeneity of the health variables in the labour force participation equation through simultaneous estimation of health and the labour force participation equations. Subsequently, data from the first waves of data are being used which will better permit controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. The data from the later waves also provide measures of health shocks experienced during the previous year.

Research papers arising from this project are:

Working paper 04/2004 has now been published. The publication details are:

Cai, L. and Kalb, G. (2006), “Health Status and Labour Force Participation: Evidence from the HILDA Data”, Health Economics, 15(3), pp. 241-261.

The contact for this project is Dr Guyonne Kalb.