L’effet du chômage sur la douleur chronique en France : une note

Chronic pain is a major public health issue. Several papers in the literature report a positive correlation between chronic pain and unemployment. The purpose of this work is to determine whether this correlation reflects a causal relationship, because if this were the case, then appropriate public policies would have to be put in place. We use a rich french database (Health and Professional Itinerary Survey) that allows to take into account the reverse causality bias. Thanks to the presence of a retrospective biography that includes both health and career information, we are able to implement a credible instrumental variable strategy. While we also observe a positive correlation between unemployment and chronic pain in our data, our results show that this correlation does not reflect any causal relationship. Maybe more surprisingly, we also show that the experience of unemployment reduces non-chronic pain of men. From a public policy perspective, this result indicates that if unemployed people are to be supported in terms of mental health, they do not have to be specifically targeted for pain prevention or support measures.