Feeling useless: the effect of unemployment on mental health in the Great Recession
This article documents a strong connection between unemployment and mental distress using data from the Spanish National Health Survey. We exploit the collapse of the construction sector to identify the causal effect of job losses in different segments of the Spanish labor market. Our results sugges...
| Autores: | , , |
|---|---|
| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2018 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/127735 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/127735 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Salut mental Atur Política d'ocupació Crisi econòmica, 2008-2009 Treballadors de la construcció Psicologia del treball Mental health Unemployment Manpower policy Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2009 Construction workers Industrial psychology |
| Resumo: | This article documents a strong connection between unemployment and mental distress using data from the Spanish National Health Survey. We exploit the collapse of the construction sector to identify the causal effect of job losses in different segments of the Spanish labor market. Our results suggest that an increase of the unemployment rate by 10 percentage points due to the breakdown in construction raised reported poor health and mental disorders in the affected population by 3 percentage points, respectively. We argue that the size of this effect responds to the fact that the construction sector was at the center of the economic recession. As a result, workers exposed to the negative labor demand shock faced very low chances of re-entering employment. We show that this led to long unemployment spells, stress, hopelessness, and feelings of uselessness. These effects point towards a potential channel for unemployment hysteresis. |
|---|