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Racial/Ethnic Differences in the Effects of Psychiatric Disorders on Employment

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Abstract

Prior research on the disability burden of mental disorders has focused on the non-Latino white population, despite the growing size and importance of racial/ethnic minorities in the labor market and in the US population as a whole. This paper is one of the first to test for racial/ethnic differences in the effects of mental disorder on employment outcomes with data from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiological Studies (CPES). We find that recent psychiatric disorder is associated with a reduction in the likelihood of employment for men of all racial/ethnic groups relative to non-Latino whites with the possible exception of Caribbeans. These findings are driven by the effects of anxiety and affective disorders. For females, only affective disorders appear to detract from employment overall. Much larger negative effects are found for Latino women with anxiety disorders.

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Notes

  1. Altonji and Blank (1999) note that prior work on racial differences in labor market outcomes focuses on African-Americans vs. whites. Much less is known about the experiences of Latinos, Asians, and other racial/ethnic groups.

  2. These tabulations ignore potentially important differences across sub-ethnic groups. Data on occupation and other labor market outcomes by sub-ethnic group, however, is not typically available, particularly for Asians.

  3. We re-estimated all models using a probit and calculated the marginal effects ignoring this issue (thus, the interpretation of the coefficients is correct in all cases except for the interaction effects). These models led to virtually identical findings as the OLS models, even for the interaction effects.

  4. The potential for reverse causality is possibly mitigated to some extent by the fact that employment status is measured as of the day of the survey while psychiatric disorder status pertains to the 12 months preceding the survey.

  5. In Chatterji et al. (2008), we estimate similar models and address the problem of endogeneity using bivariate probit models.

  6. Design and methodological information can be found at the CPES website (https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/CPES/index.html).

  7. Note that there are some respondents who have missing values for more than one of these categories. For this reason, the sum of the categories is greater than the total number of respondents excluded from the sample.

  8. Any psychiatric disorder includes the following fourteen diagnoses: (1) major depression; (2) dysthymia; (3) agoraphobia; (4) generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); (5) panic attack; (6) panic disorder; (7) social phobia; (8) alcohol abuse; (9) alcohol dependence; (10) illicit drug abuse; (11) illicit drug dependence; (12) post-traumatic stress disorder; (13) anorexia; and (14) bulimia.

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Acknowledgement

We acknowledge funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation #1 K23 DA018715-01A2 and from NIH Research Grant # 1P50 MHO 73469 funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. The NLAAS data used in this analysis were provided by the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance. The project was supported by NIH Research Grant # U01 MH 06220-06A2 funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Correspondence to Pinka Chatterji.

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Chatterji, P., Alegria, M. & Takeuchi, D. Racial/Ethnic Differences in the Effects of Psychiatric Disorders on Employment. Atl Econ J 37, 243–257 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-009-9182-x

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