The health burden of job strain: evidence from Europe

Abstract This paper studies how occupational stressors and job tasks over the life course are associated with health later in life. Using SHARE data and retrospective job histories for individuals across Europe, we construct career-long exposure to occupational stressors by linking 4-digit ISCO occupations to external measures of job demands. We find that physical job intensity, measured by the metabolic equivalent of task, is associated with worse later-life health, and this result remains stable across sensitivity analyses. Higher exposure is also associated with a greater incidence of some cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and with an earlier onset of several cardiovascular, metabolic, and respiratory conditions. We use detailed task information and a LASSO-based approach to identify the job tasks most strongly associated with poor health and to build a Job Strain Intensity index. This task-based framework offers a granular and scalable way to detect harmful dimensions of work and inform policy discussions.