A note on the impact of hours worked on mortality in OECD countries

Abstract

We investigate whether an increase in hours worked per employed person raises the total mortality rate in a sample of 23 OECD countries. We build on earlier research but extend the analysis by introducing the number of hours worked per employed as an additional regressor. Contrary to our expectations, we found that an increase in the number of hours worked actually has significantly negative effect on mortality rate, even controlling for income. Although one explanation may be that fluctuations in hours of work is in fact in this setting more a measure of the capacity use rate of the economy than a measure of how stressful work is for individuals who are working, more research on the topic is needed to find a plausible explanation for the observed phenomenon.