The Effects of Depressive Symptoms on Earnings
Conventional wisdom is that depression lowers productivity. The magnitude of this effect has been of interest to economists and other social scientists as well as medical researchers. In this paper, I take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to inve...
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Published in | Southern economic journal Vol. 75; no. 2; pp. 383 - 409 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Stillwater
Southern Economic Association
01.10.2008
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Conventional wisdom is that depression lowers productivity. The magnitude of this effect has been of interest to economists and other social scientists as well as medical researchers. In this paper, I take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to investigate the effects from a dynamic perspective and to control for unobserved heterogeneity in a fixed-effects framework. Exploiting the fact that the data set provides information about depressive symptoms in multiple years, I am able to study how changes in depressive symptoms impact productivity. My results indicate that taking personality into account is important in estimating how depression affects wages. While ordinary least-squares results render a strong negative significant effect to depressive symptom measures (especially in the men's sample), taking unobserved personal characteristics into account reduces the effects of these measures. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0038-4038 2325-8012 |
DOI: | 10.1002/j.2325-8012.2008.tb00910.x |