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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

최신자료
Classrooms as Workplaces: How Student Composition Affects Teacher Health
NBER
2026.03.09
Work-related burnout and stress-related sickness absence have become increasingly prevalent, but evidence on which workplace features shape workers’ mental health remains limited. Using population-level Swedish register data covering all lower- and upper-secondary teachers from 2006?2024, we show that schools serving more disadvantaged students exhibit substantially higher rates of sickness absence, particularly for stress-related diagnoses. Exploiting within-teacher variation across student cohorts, we separate sorting from exposure and find that a one standard deviation increase in student disadvantage raises overall and stress-related sick leave by 3.6% and 8.7%, respectively. Survey evidence indicates that these effects operate through classroom conditions rather than workload or organizational differences. The findings establish client composition as a distinct and policy-relevant determinant of worker health in contact-intensive occupations.