1.8 million workers, 50,000 firms, and a paradox: why do Hispanic Americans often have better health despite lower incomes? The answer may be where you stand at work
The sociology of health and wellbeing has been the focus of much of our department’s scholarship. Professor Cynthia Colen has been a leading contributor to this line of research, with an emphasis on how morbidity and mortality is unequally distributed across racial lines in the United States. In collaboration with two OSU economists, Kurt Lavetti and Trevon Logan, and funded by a multimillion-dollar, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, she is assessing how one’s position within the workplace might help explain important population health trends.
Using a unique dataset of administrative records from over 1.8 million workers across 50,000 companies within the state of Utah, she is investigating how certain workplace characteristics can help explain the Hispanic health paradox. This concept refers to the fact that Hispanics in the U.S. experience better health outcomes than non-Hispanic Whites despite having lower socioeconomic status (SES), on average. Most existing research on this paradox relies on education and/or income to capture SES, overlooking the role that workplace characteristics might play.
This novel research examines whether the weaker SES/health gradient observed among Hispanics extends to a number of important firm-level attributes, including firm size, worker tenure, earnings, and within-firm income rank. Professor Colen’s findings challenge conventional expectations. Absolute SES indicators (earnings, firm size, tenure) correlate with worse health, while relative workplace standing (income rank) is health protective — with stronger effects evident among Hispanic workers. These results highlight the need for a broader conceptualization of the socioeconomic conditions that shape population health and how they might operate differently across race.