Adolescent Mental Health: Impact of Introducing Earlier Compulsory School Grades

Anna Linder (), Ulf-G. Gerdtham and Gawain Heckley
Additional contact information
Anna Linder: Health Economics Unit, Department of Clinical Science, Lund University, https://portal.research.lu.se/sv/persons/anna-linder

No 2023:2, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The prevalence of mental illness is increasing among adolescents in many developed countries, and factors such as increased academic pressure and earlier introduction of performance evaluation may in part explain this trend. We study the effect of introducing earlier grades in compulsory school on adolescent mental health in Sweden. To do so, we exploit a grading reform in Swedish schools in which grades were introduced in 6th grade instead of 8th grade. Controlling for potential age effects in a difference-in-discontinuities setup, we show that girls who are exposed to earlier grades are more likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety by the end of compulsory school. We do not find similar effects among boys. These results indicate that the mental well-being of girls may be particularly influenced by educational assessments such as grades during early years, which suggests that potential health effects of different grading systems should be considered.

Keywords: education policy; school grades; mental health; human capital development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2023-03-13, Revised 2023-11-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/173497778/WP23_2 Full text (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:hhs:lunewp:2023_002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics School of Economics and Management, Box 7080, S-22007 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iker Arregui Alegria ().