Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the impact of health status on the wages of men and women in National Longitudinal Survey (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2018. In doing so, I use self-assessed health status as the health measurement and address the potential endogeneity problem of
health status in the wage equation by considering a fixed-effects model. The results of the fixed-effects model are compared to those of a random-effects model. The analysis involves not only the impact of the current health status but also the impact of the health status of
the previous year on current wages. The findings in this paper suggest that poorer health status of time t means lower wages for both White and non-White workers. The lagged effect of health status on wages is higher for women than men. The results are robust across race
and gender groups.