The Effect of Unemployment on the Mental Health of Spouses – Evidence from plant closures in Germany

Jan Marcus

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2013, vol. 32, issue 3, 546-558

Abstract: Studies on health effects of unemployment usually neglect spillover effects on spouses. This study specifically investigates the effect of an individual's unemployment on the mental health of their spouse. In order to allow for causal interpretation of the estimates, it focuses on plant closure as entry into unemployment, and combines difference-in-difference and matching based on entropy balancing to provide robustness against observable and time-invariant unobservable heterogeneity. Using German Socio-Economic Panel Study data the paper reveals that unemployment decreases the mental health of spouses almost as much as for the directly affected individuals. The findings highlight that previous studies underestimate the public health costs of unemployment as they do not account for the potential consequences for spouses.

Keywords: Unemployment; Mental health; Plant closure; Entropy balancing; Job loss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (255)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/74545/1/Ma ... mployment-Mental.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of unemployment on the mental health of spouses – Evidence from plant closures in Germany (2013)
Working Paper: The Effect of Unemployment on the Mental Health of Spouses: Evidence from Plant Closures in Germany (2012)
Working Paper: The effect of unemployment on the mental health of spouses - Evidence from plant closures in Germany (2012)
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:zbw:espost:74545

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().