The effects of unemployment on mental health – and the influence of minority group membership and age

Abstract

This paper looks at the effect of unemployment on self-assessed mental health, and the influence of age and minority group membership on this effect, by running (non)linear regressions using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data of the LISS panel. The longitudinal results indicate that there is a difference in the effect of unemployment on mental health according to age and minority group membership, although the cross-sectional results argue otherwise. This underlines the importance of more longitudinal research, as cross-sectional research design might suffer from reversed causality and the results between cross-sectional and longitudinal designs seem to differ.