Evaluation of employee occupational stress by estimating the loss of human capital in Japan

BACKGROUND: Human capital is thought to be a crucial factor that drives economic growth. This study aims to understand the evaluation of the loss of human capital caused by employees’ occupational stress. METHODS: In total, 1,021,178 observations for employee occupational stress were collected from 390 companies from 2017 to 2019 in Japan. The original cross-sectional survey contains 11,167 employees with occupational stress and their socioeconomic information in 2015. The relationship between stress and annual income is estimated with polynomial regression, and accumulated human capital loss is estimated. Matching approaches are applied for corporate human capital loss. RESULTS: The negative association between annual income and employee stress is derived, which indicates that the worse the employees’ stress is, the greater the human capital losses. Importantly, we confirmed that most employees have human capital loss, and on average, for male employees aged 25, the accumulated human capital loss will reach approximately $0.6 million USD by retirement. CONCLUSION: For corporations, human capital loss is highly correlated with the number of employees, suggesting that reducing the occupational stress of employees can lead to greater corporate performance. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-022-12751-7.