The impact of labor conditions on subjective health

Summary

This paper tries to identify the causal impact of labor conditions on health in two different ways. First of all, we will try to isolate the effect of general labor conditions by using the distinction between blue collar and white collar employment. Secondly, we examine the specific effect of smoke-free workplaces by exploiting the introduction of the smoking ban in the United Kingdom as a natural experiment. We use data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), which allows us to control for previous health, fixed effects and pre-determined characteristics, like gender, age and education. We find no significant impact of labor conditions in general and smoke-free workplaces in specific on health.