Abstract: The study investigates the impact of oral contraceptive initiation on mental health outcomes among young women aged between 14 and 25, utilizing comprehensive Swedish registry data spanning from 2005 to 2017. Employing an event-time specification using Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) estimator, I compare women who initiated oral contraceptive use with not-yet-treated peers of the same age who initiated use when one or two years older. The aggregate group-time average treatment effects are calculated separately for each age cohort that initiated oral contraceptives for the first time at a specific age. The population-weighted average of aggregate group-time average treatment effects is presented for four age groups, which are the whole population 14-25 and for three subgroups 14-16, 17-19 and 20-25. The results reveal an increase in the probability of antidepressant prescriptions which coincides with the oral contraceptive initiation across all age groups. The strongest association is observed among adolescents aged 14 to 16 but an upward trend in antidepressant prescriptions prior to contraceptive initiation complicates causal interpretation. For women who initiate contraceptives at age 17-19 and 20-25, the data indicate an increase in the probability of antidepressant prescriptions due to oral contraceptive initiation. The results are consistent with the economic and medical literature showing a strong association between oral contraceptives and antidepressant use for adolescents and young adults. Further heterogeneity analysis indicates that combined oral contraceptives are linked to a statistically significant rise in antidepressant prescriptions in women between 17 to 25 years old, whereas progestogen-only pills exhibit a significant effect only among young adult women aged 20-25. Additionally, the primary indication for oral contraceptive use is examined. Women using oral contraceptives for pregnancy prevention experience effects comparable to the baseline, while those using them to alleviate the symptoms of gynaecological conditions show an increasing effect in antidepressant prescriptions only in the age group of women between 17 to 19. Robustness checks, including alternative comparison groups such as never-treated individuals and those treated at the same age but in the subsequent two calendar years, further confirm the reliability of these findings.

"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"