Jane Greve

This paper examines parental influence on school children's everyday activities that are related to a healthy or an unhealthy lifestyle. The paper is using the Danish Time-Use and Consumption Survey (DTUC) from 2008/09 with information on fathers', mothers' and children's time use.

This paper examines the relationship between schizophrenia and employment. While most other studies have used cross-sectional data to estimate this relationship, we use longitudinal register data and show the development in the employment rate of people with schizophrenia 15 years before the first admission to a psychiatric hospital until 10 years after this admission. We find a considerable drop in the employment rate for people with schizophrenia six years before the first hospitalization, and the employment rate stabilizes at 18 % after the first admission. As family and neighbourhood environment can be important factors in the development of mental illnesses and labour market outcomes, we use sibling fixed effects to estimate the relationship between schizophrenia and employment. The difference in the employment rate in 2007 for the siblings with and without schizophrenia is estimated at 67 %. This difference is reduced to 56 % when we include control variables such as marital status, educational achievement and work experience but remain unchanged when we apply a sibling fixed effect approach which controls for unobserved family specific characteristics that the siblings share.

Mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, affective disorders and personality disorders, are associated with heavy economic and non-economic burdens. This paper examines the relationship between socio-economic status in early childhood and the probability of developing schizophrenia, affective disorders and personality disorders. We use a sample of all Danish men born in 1981 and control for family factors one year before the birth of the child. The results show that men born in low-income families are more likely to be hospitalised with affective disorders. Men born in families where the father was not employed at the child's birth are more likely to be hospitalised with schizophrenia or personality disorder, than men born in families where the father was employed as wage-earner. In general, few people in the population have a severe mental illness and, consequently, the probability of developing a severe mental illness is low. However, the relative differences in the predicted probability of developing a mental illness are large when we compare children who grew up families with average characteristics with children who grew up in families with low socio-economic status (ie: household income is low, parental education is basic, and parental occupational status is not employed).