No Pain, No Gain: The Effects of Exports on Effort, Injury, and Illness

Abstract

We combine Danish data on individuals' health with Danish matched worker-firm data to understand how rising exports affect individual workers' effort, injury, and illness. We find that when firm exports rise for exogenous reasons: 1. Workers work longer hours and take fewer sick-leave days; 2. Workers have higher rates of injury, both overall and correcting for hours worked; and 3. Women have higher sickness rates. For example, a 10% exogenous increase in exports increases women's rates of injury by 6.35%, severe depression, 2.51%, using antithrombotic drugs, 7.70%, and hospitalizations due to heart attacks or strokes, 15.01%. Relative to the health literature, we provide improved identification by focusing on the effect of exogenous shocks within worker job-spells. Our results for worker effort, injury and illness represent a potentially important adjustment mechanism for trade shocks that has been largely overlooked in the globalization literature. During the 2007-2009 recession, Danish exports and on-the-job injuries fell significantly. An out-of-sample prediction using our estimates accounts for 62% of the actual decrease in job injury counts in this period. Finally, we develop a framework to calculate the welfare effects of non-fatal diseases. This framework allows us to calculate the marginal dis-utility of any non-fatal disease, such as heart attacks, and to aggregate across multiple types of sickness conditions and injury to compute the total welfare loss. Its ratio to the wage gains from rising exports is 4.91% for men but 17.26% for women.