Going beyond the usual focus on unemployment, this 2004 book explores the health effects of other kinds of underemployment including forms of inadequate employment as involuntary part-time and poverty wage work. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this compares falling into unemployment versus inadequate employment relative to remaining adequately employed. Outcomes include self-esteem, alcohol abuse, depression, and low birth weight. The panel data permit study of the plausible reverse causation hypothesis of selection. Because the sample is national and followed over two decades, the study explores cross-level effects (individual change and community economic climate) and developmental transitions. Special attention is given to school leavers and welfare mothers, and, in cross-generational analysis, the effect of mothers' employment on babies' birth weights. There emerges a way of conceptualizing employment status as a continuum ranging from good jobs to bad jobs to employment with implications for policy on work and health.

Comparing the effects of unemployment and inadequate employment relative to adequate employment, this text studies their effects on self-esteem, alcohol abuse, depression, and birth weight. Using longitudinal methods, it measures controls for reverse causation (selection) and studies a large representative sample of Americans from their late teens in 1979, to their early 30's in the last decade of the twentieth century through stages of different business cycles. The results point to a rethinking of employment status as a continuum.