Mental Health and Abortions among Young Women: Time-varying Unobserved Heterogeneity, Health Behaviors, and Risky Decisions

Lena Janys and Bettina Siflinger

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: In this paper, we provide causal evidence on abortions and risky health behaviors as determinants of mental health development among young women. Using administrative in- and outpatient records from Sweden, we apply a novel grouped fixed-effects estimator proposed by Bonhomme and Manresa (2015) to allow for time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. We show that the positive association obtained from standard estimators shrinks to zero once we control for grouped time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate the group-specific profiles of unobserved heterogeneity, which reflect differences in unobserved risk to be diagnosed with a mental health condition. We then analyze mental health development and risky health behaviors other than unwanted pregnancies across groups. Our results suggest that these are determined by the same type of unobserved heterogeneity, which we attribute to the same unobserved process of decision-making. We develop and estimate a theoretical model of risky choices and mental health, in which mental health disparity across groups is generated by different degrees of self-control problems. Our findings imply that mental health concerns cannot be used to justify restrictive abortion policies. Moreover, potential self-control problems should be targeted as early as possible to combat future mental health consequences.

Date: 2021-03, Revised 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.12159 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2103.12159

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().