Submitted
With Michelle Acampora and Francesco Capozza
Working Paper

Abstract

This paper assesses the impact of a mental health literacy intervention on the demand for mental health support among university students. We run a field experiment with 2,978 university students from one of the largest Dutch universities. The intervention provides information on the benefits of care-seeking and its potential returns in terms of academic performance. The intervention increases the willingness to pay and the demand for a mental health app among male respondents. It also increases the demand for information about coaching, correspondingly decreasing the demand for information about psychological counseling. We document that this substitution is driven by students with moderate psychological distress. Increased perceived effectiveness of low-intensity therapy options is likely to be the mechanism. In a follow-up survey three weeks later, we find evidence of a moderate improvement in mental health scores for treated female respondents, consistent with suggestive evidence of increased care-seeking behavior.

Presentation by me or my co-authors: presented at CESS Colloquium Oxford University; CBS 3rd Workshop Health and Inequality – Copenhagen; Applied Young Economics Webinar; NoBeC Early Career, UPenn; AFE, University of Chicago; EuHea2022, University of Oslo; II IEB Workshop on Public Policies; HCEO-briq SSSI 2022; 8th IRDES-DAUPHINE Workshop; Essen Mental Health Workshop, DukeNUS Medical School, Seminar; NTU, Brown Bag, the University of San Gallen; Mental Health and Economic Status Workshop, University of Warwick, Tinbergen Institute Jamboree

With Pilar García-Gómez and Tom Van Ourti
Email me for a draft

Abstract

We study the mental health effects of early life exposure to paternal job loss. Using nationwide individual-level administrative register records, we focus on firm-closureinduced job losses for fathers with children below age five in the Netherlands. These children are more likely to take mental health-related medicines in their later childhood, and this increase is mainly driven by psychostimulant drugs. The increased uptake of psychostimulants ranges from 15 percent of mean uptake in the control group at age five to around 9 percent at age twelve. The effects are significantly larger for families with mothers being the main breadwinner, suggesting that the drop in paternal income resulting from displacement is not the main driver of psychostimulant uptake. We further find that the father is more likely to take mental health medication around the time of job loss, and that the children exposed to paternal job loss are more likely to live in dissolved families. We find no evidence of exposed children living in neighborhoods with different rates of psycostimulant consumption compared to control children, while parents of treated children do report more impulsive behavior and inattention symptoms. These findings altogether indicate that differences in the diagnosis and/or prescription of psychostimulants across different neighborhoods or schools cannot explain our findings. Instead, our analyses suggest that within-household dynamics such as chaotic household environment and parental deprivation are the most likely pathways leading to higher mental health medication usage among children exposed to early-life paternal job loss.