The unemployed are often in poorer health than their employed counterparts. This cross-
sectional correlation is often attributed to a causal effect of unemployment on health. Recent
research analyzing longitudinal data often supports alternative explanations, such as
spurious correlation and/or selection of unhealthy workers into unemployment (ie, reverse
causality). In this paper, we apply a dynamic panel data estimator (system GMM) to account
for both unobserved confounders and reverse causality. Despite some evidence for health …