Does the level of unemployment protection influence how job insecurity impacts health

This study examines the relationship between job insecurity, defined as the expectation of job loss, and the health status of employed persons. We investigate whether the impact of job insecurity on health is influenced by the level of unemployment protection provided by the welfare state. We consider the 2005 German welfare reform as a natural experiment and use a difference-in-differences propensity score weighting estimator to analyse repeated large-scale cross-sectional surveys from 1999, 2006 and 2012. Job insecurity is a binary treatment indicator derived from the self-assessed risk of dismissal. Health is measured by the number of health complaints during or immediately after work. We find that the reform has led to a statistically significant increase in the negative impact of job insecurity on health. In addition to this short-term effect, a long-term effect of a similar magnitude was also observed. Furthermore, the effects of the reform are statistically insignificant for low- and high-income employees, but statistically significant for middle-income employees. For female employees, the effect is smaller but still statistically significant at the 5 % level, while it is stronger and also statistically significant for male employees.