Self-assessed health (SAH) is a frequently used measure of individuals’ health status. It is also prone to reporting heterogeneity. To control for reporting heterogeneity valid measures of the objective health status are needed. The topic becomes even more complex for cross-country...

This paper seeks to assess how economic fluctuations, measured by changes in the regional unemployment rate, affect mental health of individuals who are currently active in the labor market. We use the UK's 1997-2010 Labour Force Survey to show whether people are more likely to report suffering...

Major transformations in forms of governance of the liberal state have been wrought over the course of the last century, including the rise of neoliberalism and 'new public management'. Mental health too has witnessed change, with pharmacological treatment displacing residential care, a shift to...

In this paper we present an instrumental variables estimate of the effect of obesity on depression in females. Previous research has established a significant correlation between the two. The direction of causality, however, is unclear. We use employment data from the ES202 program and prices...

Rationale: Previous studies document that children's mental health problems cause substantial stress and burden to families. However, family burden instruments do not typically provide quantitative estimates of family costs. Few studies have attempted to measure family costs, particularly time...

I explore the short term effects of mental health symptoms on employment outcomes. To address potential simultaneity bias, I propose a new instrument related to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) that depends only on latitude and day of year. For unmarried individuals, an additional day of poor...

Problem statement: This was the first study ever done on the cost consequences of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in Egypt or any other developing/industrializing country. The following questions were empirically investigated: What are the economic costs of ASD in Egypt, and how do they compare...

We examine the physical and mental health effects of providing care to an elderly mother on the adult child caregiver. We address the endogeneity of the selection in and out of caregiving using an instrumental variable approach, and carefully control for baseline health and work status of the...

An extensive body of literature has shown that treatment can successfully reduce an individual's substance use and associated harms, impart positive economic returns with benefits far exceeding costs, and also be cost-effective relative to alternatives. However, data from the Treatment Episodes...

We examine the impacts of a state mental health parity mandate on a large employer group, which simultaneously introduced a managed behavioral health care carve-out. Overall, we find that mental health/substance abuse (MH/SA) costs dropped 39 percent from the year prior to three years after...