The cild penalty on parents’ mental health

In this project, we study the impact of entering parenthood on men’s and women’s mental health.

We follow men and women before and after the birth of their first child and estimate, year by year, the probability of various health outcomes that we can observe in registers. Our outcomes of interest are hospitalisations and drug prescriptions due to mental illness.

From previous research, we know that women and men exhibit different health behaviour, e.g., men are more likely to have more serious outcomes than women. By using several different health outcomes, our ambition is to get closer, above all, to men’s underlying health capital. Several different health outcomes also make it possible to shed some light on whether family formation itself affects the gender difference in health behaviour.

The project is interdisciplinary and includes, in addition to economists, a medical doctor and a psychologist.