Depressed Peers in Early Parenthood

Anne Toft Hansen; Jonas Cuzulan Hirani; Miriam Wüst

doi:10.1162/rest_a_01591

Depressed Peers in Early Parenthood

Anne Toft Hansen¹; Jonas Cuzulan Hirani¹; Miriam Wüst^2,3

¹ The Danish Center for Social Science Research (VIVE) · ² University of Copenhagen · ³ Center of Economic Behavior and Inequality - CEBI

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2025

Abstract This paper studies mental health spillovers among new mothers. We exploit variation in the mental health of peers in mother groups in the Danish public postnatal care program. We show that municipal nurses assign mothers arbitrarily to groups conditional on a narrow set of well-defined characteristics. Exposure to a depressed peer in the group increases mothers' mental health care uptake by 11 percent two years after birth. We document worse self-reported mental health and labor market outcomes for treated mothers. Exploring heterogeneity, we find suggestive evidence for mental health deterioration, rather than increased demand for health care, as mechanism

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01591
Pages: 1-45
Language: en
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