Health Consequences of Losing Job in Europe. Do the Contexts Make the Difference?

That socio-economic conditions influence persons’ health is a well-documented fact. Especially the employment situation has received attention, and a huge literature so far has shown that entering unemployment is negatively associated with health. Moreover, literature recognizes also that health depends on the broader institutional context, especially in terms of economic inequality and general effectiveness of welfare state provisions. Nevertheless, these studies often remain descriptive and do not go in depth in studying mechanisms leading to undesired health outcomes.

This paper aims to go beyond the current state of the art providing several contributions. First, we study socio-economic conditions in a dynamic perspective, investigating the consequences of job-loss on health and thus putting our results on a sounder bases.

Second, we take into account context and ask to what extent it can mitigate the consequences of job-loss. Specific attention is dedicated to family as important source of support. We expect the family to shelter its members from the negative consequences of job-loss, also in terms of bad health, by pooling and redistributing economic and non-material resources.

Finally, the paper shows to what extent different kind of families manage to moderate the consequences of job loss on health and how does this capacity to shelter its members vary across countries. Indeed, it is known that the responsibility in health care is jointly shared by family and (welfare) state, but lack of evidences still persist regarding their interplayed role at the time of job loss.

We address the topic using 2004-2011 EU-SILC data, and model health applying fixed-effects regressions in different welfare states clusters (Nordic, Liberal, Conservative, Southern and Eastern).