Does Precarious Employment Damage Youth Mental Health, Wellbeing, and Marriage? Evidence from Egypt Using Longitudinal Data

The work environment has witnessed dramatic changes over the past three decades as a result of globalization, competition, and economic uncertainty, which led to a sharp rise in precarious employment across the world. Although the number of precarious jobs has increased considerably in the Arab countries over the recent decades, little is known about such jobs’ social and health consequences. Using Egypt as a case study, this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by adding new evidence on the social consequences of precarious employment from an understudied region. This paper particularly looks at the impact of precarious employment on mental health, self-rated health and happiness in marriage. We use longitudinal data from the Survey of Yong People in Egypt (SYPE) conducted in 2009 and 2014. To estimate the causal impact of precarious employment, we employ several identification strategies, namely fixed and random effect regressions and instrumental variable two stage least squares. Our findings suggest that precarious employment is associated with poor mental health and worse well-being among youth. Our main findings remained across different identification strategies with different assumptions. The adverse impact of precarious work is likely to be mediated, though in some models it is a partial mediation, through poor working conditions such as low salary, maltreatment at work, job insecurity, and harassment from colleagues.