The Health Effects of Working Overtime - Evidence from Austrian Micro Data

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of working overtime on health. Overtime has previously been examined in this context mainly as a one-dimensional variable. This paper takes into account the multi-dimensional character of this factor. In addition to solely relating overtime to a health measure, this paper focuses discretely on the remuneration, the regularity, and the temporal extent of overtime, each of which comprising one of the different dimensions of overtime examined. The empirical analysis makes use of data deriving from the EU-SILC for Austria for the year 2007. The dataset offers two variables in order to study health outcomes, namely general health status and chronic disease. Chronic disease and overtime suffer, however, from reverse causality. Hence, all the empirical results of this study are exclusively based on general health status as a measure of health. The first finding is that an immediate relationship between health status and overtime is not verifiable. Nevertheless, the analysis of the different dimensions of overtime reveals significantly adverse effects on health. Unpaid overtime affects the workers’ health negatively, while paid overtime does not seem to do so. No significance was found for regularly recurring overtime, whereas erratically occurring overtime is associated with adverse health outcomes. The evidence for a relation between the temporal extent of overtime and health is weak; only the combination of working unpaid overtime at a high extent (i.e. more than 25 hours per month) shows a distinctly detrimental effect on workers’ general health status.