A cross-country analysis of the risk factors for depression at the micro and macro level

Natalia Melgar and Maximo Rossi
Additional contact information
Natalia Melgar: Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de la República

No 1909, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: Past research has provided evidence of the role of personal characteristics as risk factors for depression. However, few researches examined jointly the impact of each characteristic and whether country attributes change the probability of being depressed. This is due to the use of single-country databases. Our aim is to extend previous findings by employing a much larger dataset and including the above-mentioned country effects. We estimate probit models with country effects and we also explore linkages between specific environmental factors and depression. The dataset for this research comes from the 2007 GALLUP Public Opinion Poll that allows us to consider a large and widely heterogeneous set of micro-data. Findings indicate that depression is positively related to being a woman, adulthood, divorce, widowhood, unemployment and low income. Moreover, we provide evidence of the significant association between economic performance and depression. Inequality raises the probability of being depressed, specially, for those living in urban areas. Finally, some population’s characteristics facilitate depression (age distribution and religious affiliation).

Keywords: depression; health; well-being; cross-country research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 I10 I12 J18 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/2137 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Cross‐Country Analysis of the Risk Factors for Depression at the Micro and Macro Levels (2012)
Working Paper: A Cross-Country Analysis of the Risk Factors for Depression at the Micro and Macro Level (2010)
Working Paper: A Cross-Country Analysis of the Risk Factors for Depression at the Micro and Macro Level (2010)
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:ude:wpaper:1909

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Doneschi () and ().