Social Comparison and Young Adult Mental Health with Endogenous Network Formation

Junwei Fan, Santiago Montoya-Blandon and Eugenio Proto
Additional contact information
Junwei Fan: University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School
Santiago Montoya-Blandon: University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School
Eugenio Proto: University of Birmingham, CAGE

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: We examine how social comparison within endogenously formed peer networks affects different measures of young adult mental health. Using over 2 million smartphone-based communication records from the NetHealth Study, we construct objective social networks among university students and estimate a structural model in which individuals choose their peers and mental health depends on the income of chosen peers. When networks are treated as exogenous, higher average peer income predicts better mental health; once network formation is modelled endogenously, the relationship reverses: exposure to higher-income peers significantly worsens depressive symptoms. Income gaps harm mental health in both directions, consistent with inequality aversion rather than relative deprivation. The reversal survives extending binary links to message-weighted networks, and counterfactual exercises show that policies reducing the volume of messages exchanged with peers improve mental health, increasingly so with the size of the reduction, though the effect of targeted reductions depends on which ties are attenuated. Ignoring endogenous peer selection can thus yield qualitatively misleading conclusions about peer effects on mental health.

Keywords: social networks; relative status; mental health; network formation. JEL Classification: D63, D85, D91, I14, I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp824.2026.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:cge:wacage:824

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().