SUMMARYWe examine the relationship between unemployment and self-assessed health using the European Community Household Panel for Finland over the period 1996-2001. Our results show that the event of becoming unemployed does not matter as such for self-assessed health. The health status of those that end up being unemployed is lower than that of the continually employed. Therefore, persons who have poor health are being selected for the pool of the unemployed. This explains why, in a cross-section, unemployment is associated with poor self-assessed health. All in all, the cross-sectional negative relationship between unemployment and self-assessed health is not found longitudinally.

Two work-related sickness categories, absenteeism and presenteeism, are counterparts. However, the explanations for their prevalence point to different factors.

We examine the role of job satisfaction in the determination of establishment-level productivity. Our matched data contain both information on job satisfaction from ECHP (European Community Household Panel) and information on establishment productivity from longitudinal register data that can be linked to the ECHP. The estimates for the effect of one point increase in the establishment average level of employee job satisfaction, on a scale 1-6, on productivity vary depending on the specification of the model. Our preferred estimate, based on the IV estimation that uses satisfaction with housing conditions as instrument for job satisfaction, shows that the effect on value added per hours worked is roughly 20 percent in the manufacturing sector. The economic size of this effect is smaller, because the observations are bunched towards the higher end of the satisfaction scale making it difficult to increase the average level of job satisfaction in the establishment by one point. An increase in job satisfaction by one within-establishment standard deviation would increase productivity by 6 percent.

Employees exposed to high involvement management (HIM) practices have higher subjective wellbeing, fewer accidents but more short absence spells than "like" employees not exposed to HIM.These results are robust to extensive work, wage and sickness absence history controls. We highlight the possibility of higher short-term absence in the presence of HIM because it is more demanding than standard production and because multi-skilled HIM workers cover for one another's short absences thus reducing the cost of replacement labour faced by the employer. We find direct empirical support for this. In accordance with the theoretical framework we find also that long-term absences are independent of exposure to HIM, which is consistent with long-term absences entailing replacement labour costs and with short absences having a negative effect on longer absences.JEL classification: I10; J28; J81; M52; M53; M54

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