Survivors’ Mental Health and the Protective Role of Income Stability

Itzik Fadlon, Astrid Sophie Fugleholm and Torben Heien Nielsen

University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego

Abstract: We use administrative records on the universe of Danish households to characterize survivors’ mental health following their spouse’s death. We provide visually clear evidence for the immediate, large, and lingering adverse impacts and focus on studying the role of income security in driving the immediate effects. We find that, for both males and females, a large share of the spike in the take-up of mental health medication upon spousal death can be explained by the income loss imposed by the shock. Our results imply that safety net policies can improve survivors’ mental health via the immediate liquidity they provide. (JEL D12, D91, G51, H55, I12, I38, J16)

Keywords: 38 Economics (for-2020); 3801 Applied Economics (for-2020); 3802 Econometrics (for-2020); 3803 Economic Theory (for-2020); Brain Disorders (rcdc); Behavioral and Social Science (rcdc); Mental Health (rcdc); Women's Health (rcdc); 3 Good Health and Well Being (sdg); 3801 Applied economics (for-2020); 3802 Econometrics (for-2020); 3803 Economic theory (for-2020) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/9r83w1p6.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:ucsdec:qt9r83w1p6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().