IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/applec/v50y2018i38p4137-4152.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Job insecurity and mental health in Canada

Author

Listed:
  • Barry Watson
  • Lars Osberg

Abstract

Using six cycles of Canada’s longitudinal National Population Health Survey data (2000–2001 to 2010–2011), this article examines the relationship between job insecurity and mental health. Job insecurity is evaluated in both subjective (perception of job insecurity) and objective (probability of joblessness) terms while mental health is measured using a standardized psychological distress index. Applying a person-specific fixed-effects estimator, results indicate that for males and females age 25–64, job insecurity, regardless of how it is measured, is associated with an increase in psychological distress. Results regarding unemployment are not as conclusive, suggesting that it is not so much the actual occurrence of job loss but the threat of unemployment that is associated with higher psychological distress. Estimates of the relationship between job insecurity and psychological distress using pooled ordinary least squares are much larger, implying that much of the psychological distress/job insecurity correlation may be due to unobservable fixed characteristics. All results are robust to the inclusion and exclusion of a host of other potential determinants including income-related variables, education, and various health measures.

Suggested Citation

  • Barry Watson & Lars Osberg, 2018. "Job insecurity and mental health in Canada," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(38), pages 4137-4152, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:50:y:2018:i:38:p:4137-4152
    DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2018.1441516
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2018.1441516
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00036846.2018.1441516?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kong, Nancy & Phipps, Shelley & Watson, Barry, 2021. "Parental economic insecurity and child health," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 43(C).
    2. Paul Fiedler, 2021. "Worrying about Work? Disentangling the Relationship between Economic Insecurity and Mental Health," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1145, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    3. Lordan, Grace & Stringer, Eliza-Jane, 2022. "People versus machines: The impact of being in an automatable job on Australian worker’s mental health and life satisfaction," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 46(C).
    4. Watson, Barry & Osberg, Lars, 2019. "Can positive income anticipations reverse the mental health impacts of negative income anxieties?," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 107-122.
    5. Emanuela Resta & Giancarlo Logroscino & Silvio Tafuri & Peter Preethymol & Chiara Noviello & Alberto Costantiello & Angelo Leogrande, 2024. "The Mental Health Index across the Italian Regions in the ESG Context," Working Papers hal-04612739, HAL.
    6. Watson, Barry & Daley, Angela & Rohde, Nicholas & Osberg, Lars, 2020. "Blown off-course? Weight gain among the economically insecure during the great recession," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    7. Matthew D. Baird & Jonathan Cantor & Wendy M. Troxel & Tamara Dubowitz, 2022. "Job loss and psychological distress during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Longitudinal Analysis from residents in nine predominantly African American low‐income neighborhoods," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(9), pages 1844-1861, September.
    8. Högnäs, Robin S. & Bijlsma, Maarten J. & Högnäs, Ulf & Blomqvist, Sandra & Westerlund, Hugo & Hanson, Linda Magnusson, 2022. "It's giving me the blues: A fixed-effects and g-formula approach to understanding job insecurity, sleep disturbances, and major depression," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 297(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:50:y:2018:i:38:p:4137-4152. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.