One, individuals’ health is affected by many idiosyncratic and time-invariant factors, such as early-childhood and prenatal development.Two, individual workers’ stress and efforts are very hard to observe in the data. Three, exports are endogenous. A firm may export a lot because it uses superior technology and good management practices, which, in turn, may reduce its employees’ injury and sickness rates.
The comprehensive and panel structure of our Danish data allow us to deal with the first two issues. First, we consistently track each worker and each firm over time and so we are able to condition on job-spell fixed effects; i.e. the source of our variation is the change over time within a given workerfirm relationship. Second, a salient feature of our sample is that exports and output per worker have strong positive correlation at the firm level, and the richness of our data allows us to directly measure both stress and efforts at the worker level. For stress we observe the universe of anti-depressant purchases and visits to psychiatrists of every worker. For efforts we observe total hours worked, including over-time, by individual workers, which is an indicator for the extensive margin of efforts.

we can go one step further to distinguish between their “major” and “minor” sick-leave days because we observe the universe of healthcare transactions. Major-leave sick days correspond to time off work in which workers also access healthcare, see a doctor or buy prescription drugs, within a week. Minor sick-leave days correspond to time off work in which workers do not access healthcare. We show that major and minor sick days have different responses to exports.

Loss and grief are the connecting threads of the psychological costs of combat. Combat involves exposure to sudden and violent death. A battlefield is not the place to breakdown; denial and suppression are required for survival in such a physically and emotionally hostile environment. For example, the initial relief, even euphoria, at having escaped death often leads to guilt, shame and anger at surviving when others, friends, have died. If the losses occur during combat, a period of overwhelming psychological arousal, they may become state dependent emotional experiences, which may make them unavailable for subsequent grief work.