TABLE 4.

Health and Workers’ Labor Market Outcomes

Study	Key Findings
Bartel and Taubman 1979	Poor health (hypertension and heart disease) reduces earnings by 8.5%.
Diamond and Hausman 1984	“Bad health” has a larger impact on retirement than do any of the other demographic variables examined (education, marital status, number of dependents, wealth).
Chirikos and Nestel 1985	Compared over ten years with workers in good health, poor health reduces earnings by 12% to 28%, depending on race and gender.
Mitchell and Butler 1986	Men with arthritis had 15% to 30% lower annual earnings than did men without arthritis, depending on its severity.
Pincus, Mitchell, and Burkhauser 1989	Earnings of men and women with arthritis were 30% to 63% of the earnings of people without arthritis.
Mullahy and Sindelar 1994	Direct and indirect effects of alcohol abuse are prominently displayed in income. Empirical results suggest that alcoholism has negative indirect effects on income attributable to reduced educational attainment and increased marital disruption. These are greater than the direct effects.
Ettner, Frank, and Kessler 1997	Psychiatric disorders significantly reduce employment among both men and women. Conditional on employment, results are a small reduction in work hours and a substantial drop in income. In the aggregate, psychiatric disorders reduced the probability of employment by about 15%.
Rizzo et al. 1998	Average annual productivity losses per worker due to chronic backache were $1,230 for male workers, measured in 1996 dollars, and $773 per female worker. Aggregate annual productivity losses from chronic backache were approximately $28 billion in the United States. Productivity losses from chronic backache differ by gender and other sociodemographic characteristics. Aggregate labor productivity losses associated with chronic backache were quite large and comparable to estimates of the direct medical costs associated with treating this chronic illness.
Fronstin and Holtmann 2000	Health insurance increases the likelihood of good health, which in turn increases expected earnings. The annual increase in earnings for men working full time and for a full year ranges from $97 to $381 and, for women, from $47 to $467.