An Analysis on Danish Micro Data - School of Economics and ...

Table 1 Sample size – by number of individuals and observations
Individuals Observations
Women Men Women Men
Total sample 1913 1202 711 5398 3508 1890
<strong>An</strong>tidepressant users 251 185 66 468 350 118
When looking at the number of individuals, almost 63 % of the total sample is women, and when
confined to the antidepressant users this figure is close to 74 %. Taking a look at the number of
observations, the percentages are even larger. 65 % of the total sample is women and almost 75 %
of the antidepressant users are women. The separation between individuals and observations is
made here just to give an impression of how many individuals the sample population is comprised
of.
In the analysis the sample population is narrowed down to women due to a number of reasons. First
of all, women behave different in the labour market than do men, since they have a lower rate of
labour force participation and work fewer hours than men. 56 Because women have more freedom of
choice regarding employment, according to Ruhm (1992) this causes their labour supply decision to
be more heavily influenced by bad health compared to men. If both men and women were to be part
of the sample population, the analysis would best be performed separately due to these
dissimilarities between the sexes. Second, as seen from table1 65 % of the sample population are
women, so not much data is lost by confining to women. <strong>An</strong>d finally women in general are also
more exposed to depression than men, which make the results more relevant for policy-making.
Hereafter, whenever the sample population is mentioned, only the observations on women are
meant. The baseline sample population consists of 3508 observations, however in certain
estimations the number of observations used will be smaller, but this will be explicitly mentioned.
4.2 Construction of variables
Once the sample population is selected from the medicine dataset as described above, additional
information on these individuals is gathered, by finding the selected individuals in the register
dataset and extracting the socio-economic data on them. Table A in appendix 2 gives a description
of all the variables. Some of the variables that were not in the dataset originally have been
56 Ruhm (1992)
33