Working Papers
Adolescents' Mental Health and Human Capital: The Role of Socioeconomic Rank.
I provide evidence on the causal effects of a student's relative socioeconomicstatus during high school on their mental health and human capital development. Leveraging data from representative US high schools, I utilize between-cohort differences in the distributions of socioeconomic status within schools in a linear fixed effects model to identify a causal rank effect. I find that a higher rank during high school improves a student's depression scores, cognitive ability, self-esteem and popularity. The rank effects are persistent with long-lasting consequences for adult depression and college attainment. Additional analyses emphasize the role of inequality in exacerbating these rank effects.
The CoVid-19 Pandemic and Mental Health: Disentangling Crucial Channels. (with Bettina Siflinger, Sebastian Seitz, Moritz Mendel and Hans-Martin von Gaudecker)
Since the start of the CoViD-19 pandemic, a major source of concern has been its effect on mental health. Using pre-pandemic information and five customized questionnaires in the Dutch LISS panel, we investigate how mental health in the working population has evolved along with the most prominent risk factors associated with the pandemic. Overall, mental health decreased sharply with the onset of the first lockdown but recovered fairly quickly. In December 2020, levels of mental health are comparable to those in November 2019. We show that perceived risk of infection, labor market uncertainty, and emotional loneliness are all associated with worsening mental health. Both the initial drop and subsequent recovery are larger for parents of children below the age of 12. Among parents, the patterns are particularly pronounced for fathers if they shoulder the bulk of additional care. Mothers' mental health takes a particularly steep hit if they work from home and their partner is designated to take care during the additional hours.
Online Appendix can be found here.
Work in Progress
Peer Effects in Financial Decisions. (with Katja Kaufmann, Yasemin Özdemir )
We exploit the rich demographic and geographic information of the Dutch administrative data maintained by Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, CBS) to analyze peer effects in financial decisions. Understanding how individuals make financial decisions is important because such decisions may have long-term consequences for individuals’ wealth and well-being as well as for the development of their children. Additionally, recognizing such peer effects is crucial for policy makers as policy changes may not only have a direct effect, but also an indirect effect through changes in the behavior of the social environment.