Workplace Stratification and Racial Health Disparities

The Institute for Research on Poverty hosts seminars on the UW-Madison campus most Thursdays during the academic year. These presentations are free and open to the public. Room 8417.

media release: Trevon Logan, professor, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University  

To what extent is a worker’s relative rank within their workplace a determinant of health status, conditional on income? We provide the first U.S.-based evidence on the relationship between relative workplace rank and health status for the near population of workers in one U.S. state. Using a new linkage of commercial all-payer health insurance data to administrative earnings records for workers in Utah from 2013–2015, we quantify the impact of relative workplace rank on health status, the incidence of specific chronic diseases, and racial health disparities. We show that about 70% of SES-health gradient that is commonly interpreted as an income gradient actually operates through relative rank. For an average worker, moving from the 90th to the 10th percentile of within-firm rank holding fixed income, age, location, and health insurance characteristics is associated with a 16.5% increase in morbidity. The racial segregation of jobs in the U.S. leads minority workers to be overrepresented in lower-ranked jobs within firms, which in turn exacerbates racial health disparities.