THE EFFECT OF MENTAL HEALTH ON EMPLOYMENT: EVIDENCE FROM AUSTRALIAN PANEL DATA
利用10轮高质量面板数据和工具变量模型，研究发现心理健康下降一个标准差会使就业率降低30个百分点，且该效应主要由劳动力供给方驱动，对年长工人影响更大。
To what extent does poor mental health affect employment outcomes? Answering this question involves multiple technical difficulties: two-way causality between health and work, unobservable confounding factors and measurement error in survey measures of mental health. We attempt to overcome these difficulties by combining 10 waves of high-quality panel data with an instrumental variable model that allows for individual-level fixed effects. We focus on the extensive margin of employment, and we find evidence that a one-standard-deviation decline in mental health reduces employment by 30 percentage points. Further investigations suggest that this effect is predominantly a supply rather than a demand-side response and is larger for older than young workers.