The wear and tear of health: Does manual work matter for health at an older age?

Using German panel data spanning 26 years, we find that manualwork leads to faster deterioration of health than nonmanual work forthe group of workers between 50 and 65 years old. We control fortime-varying and time-invariant omitted variable bias and reportingheterogeneity and we estimate an upper and a lower bound of the effectof manual work on health, as a consistent estimator is unavailable forour data. We do not find evidence of an effect of manual work onhealth for the group of workers between 16 and 50 years old.