IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32354.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Macroeconomics of Mental Health

Author

Listed:
  • Boaz Abramson
  • Job Boerma
  • Aleh Tsyvinski

Abstract

We develop an economic theory of mental health. The theory is grounded in classic and modern psychiatric literature, is disciplined with micro data, and is formalized in a life-cycle heterogeneous agent framework. In our model, individuals experiencing mental illness have pessimistic expectations and lose time due to rumination. As a result, they work less, consume less, invest less in risky assets, and forego treatment which in turn reinforces mental illness. We quantify the societal burden of mental illness and evaluate the efficacy of prominent policy proposals. We show that expanding the availability of treatment services and improving treatment of mental illness in late adolescence substantially improve mental health and welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • Boaz Abramson & Job Boerma & Aleh Tsyvinski, 2024. "Macroeconomics of Mental Health," NBER Working Papers 32354, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32354
    Note: EFG EH PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32354.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Diego Ascarza-Mendoza & Christian Velasquez, 2025. "On the Dynamics of Mental Health," Working Paper Series of the School of Government and Public Transformation 7, School of Government and Public Transformation, Tecnológico de Monterrey.
    2. Ana María Iregui-Bohórquez & María Teresa Ramírez-Giraldo & Ligia Alba Melo-Becerra & Héctor M. Zárate-Solano, 2025. "Pandemia del Covid-19 y salud mental en Colombia: un análisis de riesgos competitivos," Borradores de Economia 1300, Banco de la Republica de Colombia.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General
    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32354. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.