Kingston, Canada – August 2026 – The John Deutsch Institute (JDI) has released a new JDI Policy Insight paper, Employment and Health: Mechanisms Beyond the Empirical Studies, written by Jin Young Yoon, a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at Queen’s University. Canada spends roughly 11 to 12 percent of GDP on health care and substantial additional sums on Employment Insurance and active labour market programs, yet the two policy areas are usually designed separately. The paper asks what connects them.

The obstacle to answering that question is that employment and health each influence the other. Healthier people are more likely to find and keep work, which makes it hard to read a simple correlation as evidence that work improves health. Yoon approaches the problem by examining the specific channels through which employment might operate, using two studies with very different findings as a way in.

The Whitehall Study, which followed more than 10,000 British civil servants from 1967, found that health improved steadily with employment grade: lower-ranked staff showed more angina, ischemia, and chronic bronchitis than their senior colleagues, despite all of them being employed. The Community Employment Innovation Project, a Nova Scotia experiment that randomly assigned three-year community jobs to half of 1,514 unemployed participants, found that employment improved health, with effects persisting for 14 months after the jobs ended.

Yoon argues the two results are consistent once the mechanisms are separated. Income matters, and both studies involve gains in it. But so do working hours, with UK civil servants averaging 45 hours a week against 35 for CEIP participants. So does perceived job control, which is low in the junior ranks of a hierarchical bureaucracy and higher in the varied community roles CEIP created. So does workplace social interaction, which the community-based design of CEIP encouraged and routine civil service work did not. Employment can improve health or damage it, depending on which of these channels dominates.

Yoon recommends:

1. Evaluate labour programs on health outcomes. Job creation and re-employment initiatives should be assessed on participant health alongside employment rates and earnings, since the jobs they provide can improve or worsen it.
2. Regulate for job quality, not just job quantity. The Whitehall results show that employment alone does not protect health, pointing to a role for standards governing autonomy, working hours, and fair compensation.
3. Preserve the non-monetary benefits of work. Because unemployment removes social interaction as well as income, unemployment policy should attempt to sustain social engagement and continuing education.
4. Tailor policy to the target population. For people moving out of unemployment the gains come through income, routine, and social contact; for those already in low-quality jobs, working conditions matter more than employment status.

Yoon is careful about what the evidence cannot yet settle. The CEIP effects are measured over months rather than years, and whether health gains persist under sustained employment remains open, as does the question of which job characteristics matter most.

The full paper is available as JDI Policy Insight 26-0801 on the JDI website at jdi.queensu.ca.

About the John Deutsch Institute and the JDI Policy Insight series
The JDI at Queen’s University conducts rigorous, policy-relevant economic research to inform decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society. Through events, publications, and collaborations, the Institute fosters evidence-based dialogue on critical economic challenges facing Canada and the world. The newly launched JDI Policy Insight series provides balanced academic summaries of key policy issues, helping readers assess the benefits, costs, and risks of reforms and understand what we know and don’t know about policy.