Trajectoires professionnelles et santé en Europe

The main objective of this thesis is to analyse the health consequences of career shocks in Europe. It considers two actual career shocks over the lifecourse: leaving full-time education in a bad economy, and, at the other end of the age spectrum, retiring. In-between these two critical periods, it investigates how an anticipated career shock -- i.e. anticipated job loss -- damages health. Empirical analyses are conducted using large European and British surveys. We use institutional features and natural experiments to find neat instruments for causal identification~: the existence of compulsory schooling laws, the cross-country variation in employment protection legislations, the cross-country variation in retirement systems and the 1973 oil crisis. The results emphasise the causal and health-damaging impact of career shocks, both in the short and in the long-term.