Ulf Gerdtham
Professor
Social assistance and mental health: evidence from longitudinal administrative data on pharmaceutical consumption
Author
Summary, in English
This paper adds to the small literature on the role of welfare benefits and mental health by studying the relationship between uptake of Social Assistance Benefit (SAB) and objective mental health measures. We use rich longitudinal administrative data on income, unemployment benefits and psychopharmaceutic prescriptions (antidepressants, anxiolytics, and hypnotics) for more than 140,000 Swedes in 2006–2012. Relative to earlier studies focusing on subjective mental health, an advantage of our approach is that we use longitudinal administrative data that do not suffer from non-response, under-reporting and self-justification biases. While we document a strong positive association between SAB and psychopharmaca consumption in ordinary least squares models, fixed effects estimates indicate that most of the association is due to unobserved individual-specific predisposition. Insofar as a relationship remains in the fixed effect models, it is driven by highly educated men. This result is consistent with earlier quantitative studies using survey data and with qualitative research suggesting that SAB uptake may be particularly stigmatizing for individuals with a higher initial socioeconomic position.
Department/s
- Department of Economics
- Centre for Economic Demography
- Health Economics
- EpiHealth: Epidemiology for Health
Publishing year
2020
Language
English
Pages
2165-2177
Publication/Series
Applied Economics
Volume
52
Issue
20
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Routledge
Topic
- Health Care Service and Management, Health Policy and Services and Health Economy
Status
Published
Project
- Public Management Research
Research group
- Health Economics
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1466-4283