Unemployment and Health Conditions A Count Data Approach*

This paper analyses the consequences of unemployment for health conditions, where the individual frequency of doctor consultations over a year is used as a measure of health. The structure of the data makes count data estimation methods convenient and different statistical models are set up, cross-sectional as well as panel data models, to investigate whether the results are influenced by unobserved heterogene-ity. The main finding is that when correcting for the dependence between the explanatory variables and the unobserved individual-specific effects, the effect of unemployment becomes insignificant, indicating no causal effect of unemployment on health conditions