News
Xavier Bartoll successfully defended his doctoral thesis
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Date: 01/10/2019
On September 26th, 2019, Xavier Bartoll Roca defended his doctoral thesis titled "Essays in Health and Labour Economics” supervised by Dr Raúl Ramos.
The doctoral committee was composed of Dr Toni Mora (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya), Dr Catia Nicodemo (University of Oxford) and Dr Cristina Borra (Universidad de Sevilla) who decided to grade the PhD thesis with an “Excellent Cum Laude”.
The main objective of the thesis, organised along four different research chapters, is to analyse how labour market conditions are associated with different health outcomes and how the economic crisis has affected this relationship. A first aim of this thesis is to analyse the job quality and health status of temporary employment versus permanent before and during the economic crisis in Spain. The results show that the quality of work for women with temporary employment worsens during the economic crisis but not for men. However, this poorer job quality does not translate into poorer mental distress compared to permanent. Conversely, men in temporary employment experienced poorer mental distress before and during the economic crisis but without changes except an increase for older men and those with university degree. In addition to that, the work environment dimension of job quality becomes more valued during the economic crisis. The second aim is to explore the interrelation between working hours, job satisfaction and its effect on health outcomes. Using data for Catalonia, the third chapter confirms that working long hours (41-47 h/w) predict poorer self-perceived health. Moreover, the positive health effect of job satisfaction is reduced when working long hours. Unexpectedly, working very long hours (above 48 h/w) was protective for health among men. It is hypothesised that mismatches between actual and desired hours may help to explain these results. The last chapter, using European data, finds associations between adverse mental distress and over- and underemployed but not with working hours per se, so that more worker control over working hours would improve well-being.