Journal de l'économie mondiale

Overwork and Adverse Effects on Health

Abstract

Tetsuji Yamada, Tadashi Yamada, Chia-Ching Chen and Weihong Zeng

The Japanese Government reports that the health of Japanese employees deteriorated in the 1990s - 2000s during the Japanese recession. This paper examines the relationship between overtime work and health of employees. We present a theoretical model showing that overtime work causes an individual’s health to deteriorate. This is based on the hypothesis that overtime work is implicitly built into a firm’s promotion system. Using the data of 6,985 individuals from the first National Family Research in 1998 (NFR98) provided by the Social Science Japan Data Archive, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, our empirical results support our hypothesis and show strong associations among overtime work, health and socio-economic characteristics of individuals, as well as labor market conditions.