Spend More, Feel Better? Investigating the impact of social policy expenditure on the severity of individual depressive symptoms throughout Europe
(2023) WPMM43 20231Department of Political Science
- Abstract
- Depression has recently been highlighted across OECD countries as a public health crisis in need of immediate action. Unfortunately, the most popularized public policy solutions focus on individual biomedical or psychosocial interventions. This thesis draws from a theory on economic determinants of mental health to explore if within-country increases in social protection policy expenditure levels over time can affect individuals' depressive symptom outcomes. We use cross-sectional panel data across three rounds of the European Social Survey and state-level social protection expenditure data from the OECD Social Expenditure database for 16 countries across three years (2006/12/14). We operationalize 8 survey questions from the ESS panel... (More)
- Depression has recently been highlighted across OECD countries as a public health crisis in need of immediate action. Unfortunately, the most popularized public policy solutions focus on individual biomedical or psychosocial interventions. This thesis draws from a theory on economic determinants of mental health to explore if within-country increases in social protection policy expenditure levels over time can affect individuals' depressive symptom outcomes. We use cross-sectional panel data across three rounds of the European Social Survey and state-level social protection expenditure data from the OECD Social Expenditure database for 16 countries across three years (2006/12/14). We operationalize 8 survey questions from the ESS panel data into a depression score for three different sample populations (N’s = 30064, 21309, & 91859). We interact the depression score with country-level social protection expenditure data in 14 fixed effects regressions. Results show that increases in the expenditure level of a majority of state-level social policy programs have a small inverse relationship with individuals’ depressive symptom outcomes within the countries we have observed. Thus, within-country increases in social protection expenditure levels have a mitigating effect on individual-level depressive symptoms within that country's population. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9115266
- author
- Eger-Beyeler, Ari LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- WPMM43 20231
- year
- 2023
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Mental Health, Depressive Symptoms, Social Policy Expenditure, Fixed-Effects Regression Model, European Social Survey
- language
- English
- id
- 9115266
- date added to LUP
- 2023-08-27 16:31:43
- date last changed
- 2023-08-27 16:31:43
@misc{9115266, abstract = {{Depression has recently been highlighted across OECD countries as a public health crisis in need of immediate action. Unfortunately, the most popularized public policy solutions focus on individual biomedical or psychosocial interventions. This thesis draws from a theory on economic determinants of mental health to explore if within-country increases in social protection policy expenditure levels over time can affect individuals' depressive symptom outcomes. We use cross-sectional panel data across three rounds of the European Social Survey and state-level social protection expenditure data from the OECD Social Expenditure database for 16 countries across three years (2006/12/14). We operationalize 8 survey questions from the ESS panel data into a depression score for three different sample populations (N’s = 30064, 21309, & 91859). We interact the depression score with country-level social protection expenditure data in 14 fixed effects regressions. Results show that increases in the expenditure level of a majority of state-level social policy programs have a small inverse relationship with individuals’ depressive symptom outcomes within the countries we have observed. Thus, within-country increases in social protection expenditure levels have a mitigating effect on individual-level depressive symptoms within that country's population.}}, author = {{Eger-Beyeler, Ari}}, language = {{eng}}, note = {{Student Paper}}, title = {{Spend More, Feel Better? Investigating the impact of social policy expenditure on the severity of individual depressive symptoms throughout Europe}}, year = {{2023}}, }