Abstract:  This paper examines whether oral contraceptives affect young women’s mental health. To address this question, I use population-wide Swedish registry data for women aged 14–25 between 2005 and 2017 and implement an event-study difference-in-differences design following Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021). The design compares initiators of oral contraceptives with not-yet-treated peers born in the same year and quarter who begin one or two years later, thereby strengthening the credibility of the counterfactual. The results show that oral contraceptive initiation is followed by a rise in antidepressant prescriptions, with effects concentrated among older adolescents and young adults. For women aged 17–19 and 20–25, I find increases of roughly 9 and 19 percent, respectively, relative to the year before initiation. In contrast, the youngest group (ages 14–16) exhibits pronounced pre-trends, consistent with selection into early initiation. Further analysis indicates that the pre-trends in the youngest group of initiators (aged 14-16) are largely driven by women with ADHD. For the older groups (ages 17–19 and 20–25), differences in contraceptive type do not explain the results, whereas women who initiate oral contraceptives to treat gynaecological conditions exhibit worse mental health outcomes than those who initiate for contraceptive purposes. Using rich Swedish administrative data and a modern difference-in-differences design with a credible counterfactual, this paper shows that the educational and labour-market gains from contraceptive access may come at a cost to women’s mental health, particularly among early initiators with pre-existing vulnerabilities, and highlights the role of initiation motives in women’s mental health.

"Sick of Becoming a Parent: The Child Penalty on Parents’ Mental Ill-Health"  (with Emma Fransson, Erik Grönqvist, Stavros Iliadis and Erica Lindahl)

Abstract: The study examines how the transition to parenthood affects mental health among Swedish first-time mothers and fathers, using administrative register data from 1990 to 2008. We track antidepressant use and psychiatric hospitalizations from five years before to ten years after childbirth, capturing both mild and severe forms of mental illness. We find that mothers experience a temporary decline in mental health service use, whereas fathers exhibit steadily increasing rates of antidepressant use and hospitalizations following childbirth. These patterns are consistent across education levels, income groups, and birth cohorts, suggesting that the mental health consequences of parenthood are broadly shared. Our study contributes by providing a comprehensive view of mental ill-health across care settings and severity levels; by documenting mental health effects for fathers, a group often underexamined in prior research; by showing that these effects are remarkably stable across time and socioeconomic groups; and by addressing methodological limitations in event-study designs using recent developments in difference-in-differences estimation.

"Sick Children and Parents' Mental Health Outcomes"