Health status and labour market outcome: Empirical evidence from Australia

摘要

This paper uses eight waves of Australia Household, Income and Labour Dynamics data to study the issues of state dependence and the short-run and long-run response to health shocks on the labour market. We consider six alternative panel data binary dependent variable models with different ways of modelling labour market dynamics and individual heterogeneity. We find that the key results with regard to labour market dependence and the impacts of health shocks are sensitive to model specification and pooling of male and female samples with differences as large as sixfold. Specification analysis is conducted and favours the dynamic fixed effects logit model for separate male and female samples. Methods for evaluating dynamic response paths to a one-time health shock for binary outcomes are also suggested and results are presented.