The Effects of Workplace Social Status on Minority Health Disparities

ABSTRACT Employment rank within workplaces has long been known to be correlated with a wide range of health outcomes, including morbidity and life expectancy. Our proposed project will extend the research on workplace status as a determinant of health by examining the associations between measures of rank and health outcomes. To do this, we will use a novel database that links health insurance enrollment records and medical claims to administrative earnings data for more than 1.8 million workers and 50,000 firms in Utah. Using a broad set of firms will allow us to separate the impacts of financial resources from within-firm status measures. A challenge to separating correlations from causal effects is that employment rank may be endogenously determined by health status. To account for this potential endogeneity, we will construct instrumental variables based on network statistics from the labor market and/or shocks to firm organizational structure. We will use this instrumental variables design to estimate the causal effect of employment rank on health status. Finally, we will link workers to their adult children in the workforce to quantify the intergenerational persistence of health differences that operate through the workplace rank.