Linking health to employment history of the entire Slovenia’s workforce, this paper employs three innovative features. First, it utilizes a novel “double proof” approach of addressing the reverse causality by continuously monitoring health status of individuals and relying on mass layoffs to provide an additional layer of exogeneity. Second, it uses data on drug prescriptions to infer information about the health status. And third, it treats health effects of unemployment as part of a dose–response relationship and tracks the share of time spent in unemployment. The paper finds that unemployment increases hazard of all three studied groups of diseases – cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and mental disorders – as well as of hospitalizations caused by these diseases, with the effects stretching over a 15-year horizon. The results also show that unemployment significantly increases the probability of death due to cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders, as well as death of any cause.
COBISS.SI-ID: 61823747
Over the past twenty-five years, wage inequality has fallen in Slovenia, even as it has risen in most developed economies. The rates of return to education and work experience rose and remained high on average. However, rapid increases in the number of college graduates have outpaced the rising relative demand for skill among the youngest labor market entrants. As a result, the youngest cohorts of college graduates have experienced declining returns to education and a downward shift in their occupational distribution, which has not been experienced by older college graduates. These changes coincide with the implementation of the Bologna Reform, which reduced the length of time necessary to complete a bachelor’s degree and contributed to the incentives to attend college. Falling returns to tertiary education contributed to declining within cohort wage inequality among the young, which was large enough to reduce overall wage inequality.
COBISS.SI-ID: 58643203
There has been considerable interest in recent years in quantifying the rate of unavoidable or so-called random cancers, as opposed to cancers linked to environmental, genetic or other factors. We propose a data-based approach to estimate an upper limit to this probability, based on an analysis of multiple registry data. The argument is that the cumulative hazards for random cancers cannot exceed the minimum reliable cumulative hazard observed across the registries. We propose a Monte Carlo method to identify this upper limit and apply the method to data on nine different cancers recorded by 423 registries. We compare our values with estimates obtained from a random mutations argument. Our method can be applied to any other noncommunicable disease for which national registries exist (like diabetes or cardiovascular diseases).
COBISS.SI-ID: 14890755
The paper reviews the experience of other EU and OECD countries with selected measures aimed at combating long-term unemployment, summarizes the findings of the review and identify best practices, and provides policy recommendations for Slovenia. It focuses on the following measures: (i) improving employment services to jobseekers at risk of long-term unemployment, (ii) participation in active labor market programs by long-term unemployed, (iii) applying selected “remedial” approaches helping the long-term unemployed, and (iv) introducing innovative labor market programs targeting long-term unemployed.
COBISS.SI-ID: 512407932