Why is the Mental Health of the Youngest American Workers in Decline?

David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson

No 34696, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The worsening mental health of young workers in the United States drives the disappearance of the U-shape in wellbeing and the hump-shape in illbeing in the last decade. Illbeing declines in age among workers but is hump-shaped among non-workers across all US states. This has been the case for some time and is apparent in our analyses of two large US datasets with long time runs - the Behavioral Risk Survey System 1993-2025 and the National Health Interview Survey of 1997-2024. Although the mental health of workers and non-workers has been declining it has been deteriorating most quickly among young workers, leading to a steepening in the age gradient of mental illbeing for workers. Improvements in worker wellbeing (and declines in worker illbeing) with age are mirrored in age differences in reported working conditions in the American Job Quality Survey of 2025: six measures of job quality rise with age. Declines in mental health are most pronounced among the youngest workers ages 18-22 who are likely drawn from lower socio-economic classes and report the greatest difficulties making ends meet.

JEL-codes: I31 J28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
Note: CH LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34696.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34696

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34696
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().