Would you return to work after a health crisis? Your education could be the deciding factor

CHE RESEARCH BITES

By Terence C Cheng, Seonghoon Kim and Dennis Petrie

25 October, 2024

Experiencing a severe illness can adversely affect people’s health and their ability to work. A new study from Monash Business School’s Centre for Health Economics uncovers how illness impacts people’s health, work, and income, and investigates how the effects vary across education groups.

The study tracked the health and work life of nearly 12,000 older Singaporeans, aged 50 and over, on a monthly basis for five years. It focused on whether these Singaporeans were diagnosed with heart disease and cancer, and examined how health and work changes across people with different education levels.

While people’s health status recovers similarly across all education levels after they become ill, their work circumstances are quite different, the study shows.

Less-educated men and women are much less likely to keep working or earn an income after becoming severely ill, compared with more highly-educated individuals.

In contrast, more-educated men tend to work more and earn more, a year after their illness. This behaviour might be driven by a stronger sense of purpose to achieve one’s career goals after an illness episode.

Differences in occupations across education groups are likely to have played a role in why less-educated men experience a bigger drop in work after getting sick.

To fully understand the impact of ill health on people’s well-being, it is important to look also at system-level factors like retirement and pension policies to understand how they affect decisions around health, work and retirement.

This knowledge can help in designing policies to provide the right incentives, support, and assistance for older people who want to continue working.

Find the original article: Terence C Cheng, Seonghoon Kim and Dennis Petrie, Health shocks, health and labor market dynamics, and the socioeconomic-health gradient in older Singaporeans, Social Science and Medicine, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116796

Find out more about Economic behaviour, incentives and preferences in health.

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