Essays on The Economics of Mental Health

Chapter 1: This paper investigates the effect of a primary caregiver’s depression on the cognitive and noncognitive skill development of the child. I utilize a weighted sample from a nationally representative cohort of children from the United States who were followed from kindergarten to fifth grade in 2011-2016. I employ a dynamic panel model to address the endogeneity of the caregiver’s depression. First, I account for time-invariant unobservables correlated with the child’s skill development and the primary caregiver's depression. Next, I reduce bias potentially caused by time-variant unobserved heterogeneity that is correlated with the caregiver’s depression using instrumental variables. A standard deviation increase in caregiver's depression decreases child's math, reading and noncognitive test scores by 0.465, 0.462, and 0.828 standard deviations, respectively. These reductions correspond to approximately 0.8 years of school learning in math, 0.9 years in math, reading, and a year in non-cognitive skills. I find some evidence that the effect of caregiver’s depression may work through parental inputs, such as employment and involvement with the child. The negative effect of the primary caregiver's depression on child skill development measured by math test scores is worse for those who are never married. Chapter 2: This paper studies how Covid-19 stress-related factors and changes in psychosocial resources during the pandemic contributed to changes in mental health symptoms among first-year college students during the pandemic. Using data on 339 first-year students (ages 18-20) at a large public university in North Carolina, we evaluated changes in anxiety and depression symptoms from before to early and later stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, we estimated longitudinal associations of chronic stress, Covid-19 stress/stressors and psychosocial resources with anxiety and depression symptoms. We found that mental health symptoms increased significantly 4-months into the pandemic. 18-months into the pandemic, depression symptoms had returned to pre-pandemic levels, but anxiety symptoms had not. Chronic stress, social isolation and distanced learning were significant risk factors; resilience was significantly protective. Results varied by the presence/absence of moderate-severe anxiety/depression symptoms pre-pandemic. Mental health symptoms for first-year college students were at already high levels pre-pandemic and have not improved 18 months into the pandemic. Colleges may help address this growing mental health crisis through bolstering social connectedness and resilience.