Labor Market, Health, and Population

Labor Market, Health, and Population is a compact 6-week advanced special topic on how health risks and population structure shape labor-market behavior. The course studies health, disability, mortality risk, fertility timing, caregiving burdens, mental health, disease exposure, aging, and demographic change as forces that alter labor supply, job choice, productivity, mobility, wages, worker welfare, and firm behavior.

The course exists as a labor special topic because health and population are not background controls. They change the feasible set of work, the value of job amenities and insurance, the timing of household labor allocation, the productivity of workers inside firms, and the way local and aggregate labor markets adjust to shocks. The course is intentionally narrower than a health-economics or demography field course. Its organizing question is always: how do health and demographic forces change work, wages, allocation, and welfare?

Prerequisites¶

• Labor I or a strong equivalent in worker-side labor economics

• Labor II or readiness to work with firms, frictions, policy incidence, and aggregate adjustment

• Graduate microeconomic theory

• Applied econometrics and comfort reading modern empirical labor papers

• Prior health economics or demography exposure is useful but not required

What Students Will Be Able To Do¶

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

1. model health as human capital, risk, productivity, and a constraint on labor supply;

2. distinguish work-capacity effects from selection, measurement error, insurance response, and labor-demand shocks;

3. connect disability, chronic conditions, fertility, mortality, caregiving, mental health, and aging to labor-market outcomes;

4. evaluate evidence on disease and environmental exposure, workplace productivity, demographic adjustment, and worker welfare;

5. design health-population-labor research questions with clear labor outcomes, mechanisms, counterfactuals, and identification strategies.

Course Format¶

Labor Market, Health, and Population is designed as a 6-week compact advanced special topic for PhD students and strong advanced MA students. It is suitable for a half-semester elective, intensive module, or graduate reading group. The course is reading-heavy and research-oriented: each week centers on one labor-market mechanism, one measurement or identification problem, and one frontier research margin.

Weekly chapters use the portfolio’s special-topics structure: Bridge, Field Core, Research Lab, Methods Box, reading ladder, exercises or discussion prompts, reproducibility note, and slide companion note. Special-topics chapters include a visible Core points box near the top; extension boxes are optional rather than a default requirement.

Connection To Labor I And Labor II¶

Labor I supplies the worker-side foundations: labor supply, human capital, households, fertility, amenities, wage determination, inequality, mobility, and worker-targeted policy. Labor II supplies the firm and market architecture: labor demand, internal labor markets, search, wage-setting, insurance, regulation, shocks, and adjustment. This course sits between them. It asks how health and demographic structure alter worker choices, household constraints, firm productivity, and equilibrium labor-market outcomes.

Weekly Sequence¶

1. Health, risk, and labor markets: core frameworks and measurement. The course opens by treating health as capital, risk, work capacity, and a measurement problem for labor economists.

2. Disability, chronic conditions, labor supply, and job choice. Students study how health limitations, program rules, accommodations, and job amenities shape work attachment, hours, occupation, and exit.

3. Fertility, mortality, caregiving, and lifecycle labor allocation. The course links fertility timing, mortality risk, aging, spousal and family shocks, and caregiving burdens to household labor supply and career dynamics.

4. Mental health, stress, workplace productivity, and worker welfare. Students examine mental health and stress as labor-market forces affecting absenteeism, presenteeism, productivity, supervision, retention, and welfare.

5. Disease exposure, environmental health, demographic change, and labor-market adjustment. The course scales up to disease, pollution, heat, aging, and demographic structure as shocks to workers, firms, local labor markets, and aggregate adjustment.

6. Synthesis, frontier questions, and student research designs. The final week converts the sequence into research designs with explicit labor outcomes, mechanisms, timing, counterfactuals, and welfare objects.

Course Map¶

• Foundational: Week 1 defines the course’s labor-market objects, health-risk vocabulary, and measurement problems.

• Worker-health and labor-supply focused: Week 2 studies disability, chronic conditions, labor supply, job choice, accommodations, and program interaction.

• Lifecycle and population focused: Week 3 studies fertility, mortality, caregiving, household labor allocation, aging, and lifecycle timing.

• Workplace and productivity focused: Week 4 studies mental health, stress, productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism, management, and worker welfare.

• Aggregate and demographic-adjustment focused: Week 5 studies disease exposure, environmental health, aging, demographic structure, firms, places, and adjustment.

• Synthesis and research design: Week 6 turns the compact course into frontier questions and student research designs.

Research Orientation¶

The course is designed to help students build labor research that takes health and population seriously without drifting into generic health economics, epidemiology, or demography. A successful project in this course starts from a labor-market outcome, names the health or population mechanism, specifies the worker, household, firm, or aggregate margin, and states the counterfactual needed to evaluate wages, employment, mobility, productivity, inequality, or worker welfare.