The probability of being depressed increases dramatically during adolescence and is linked to a range of adverse outcomes. Many studies show a correlation between religiosity and mental health, yet the question remains whether the link is causal. The key issue is selection into religiosity. We...

While the contemporaneous association between mental health problems and criminal behavior has been explored in the literature, the long-term consequences of such problems, depression in particular, have received much less attention. In this paper, we examine the effect of depression during...

This paper is the first to use the method of coarsened exact matching (CEM) to estimate the impact of mood disorders on medical care costs in order to address the endogeneity of mood disorders. Models are estimated using restricted-use, general practice patient records data from New Zealand for...

Depression affects the way that people process information and make decisions, including those involving risk and uncertainty. Our objective is to analyze the way that depressive episodes shape risk preferences and risk-taking behaviors. We are the first to address this issue using large-scale,...

We examine the effects of a comprehensive school reform on mental health. The reform postponed the tracking of students into vocational and academic schools from age 11 to age 16. The reform was implemented gradually across Finnish municipalities between 1972 and 1977. We use...

When facing financial distress, French households can file a case to a "households' over-indebtedness commission" (HDC). The HDC can order an immediate repayment or grant a debt suspension. Exploiting the random assignment of bankruptcy filings to managers, we show that a debt suspension has a...

This paper uses data from the 2002-2005-2008 waves of the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (EFF) to investigate whether debts burdens hamper people's health. Several measures of debt strain are constructed, including debt-to-income ratios, the existence of debt arrears and amounts of...

This paper investigates the potentially non-linear relation between households' indebtedness and their consumption between 2010 and 2014 in Belgium, using panel data from the two waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. Unlike previous studies, we find a negative effect of...

Some individuals borrow extensively on their credit cards. This paper tests whether present-biased time preferences correlate with credit card borrowing. In a field study, we elicit individual time preferences with incentivized choice experiments, and match resulting time preference measures to...

There is a substantial correlation between household debt and bodyweight. Theory suggests that a causal relationship between debt and bodyweight could run in either direction or both could be caused by unobserved common factors. We use OLS and Propensity Score Matching to ascertain if household...