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

73.2 % of the persons in the dataset are in a couple, which is defined as people who are married or
cohabiting and the remaining 26.8 % are single. The variable that indicates the highest completed
education is divided into three dummies. Almost half of the population only has a basic education,
which covers the elementary school and upper-secondary school. In addition the individuals with
unknown education, which are 4.3 %, are put into this category. 36.4 % has a short education,
which includes vocational and shorter higher education. The individuals taking a middle-range and
higher education comprise 15.1 % of the sample population. This category ranges from the bachelor
level till researchers. The level of education differs substantially between users and non-users of
antidepressants, and this will be looked more into in section 4.3.2. The variable denoting use of
other medicine has a mean value of 847 defined daily dosages (DDD) per year. The variance of this
variable is very large due to the fact that it ranges from 0 to 12978. Only 1.7 % of the sample
population does not use any other prescription medicine than MTX and possibly antidepressants.
The rest of the sample population is evenly distributed across the different dosages of medicine use.
Again, the users and non-users of antidepressants differ substantially in their use of other medicine,
which will be looked into in section 4.3.2. The local unemployment rate, u, is on average 6.34 %.
From the number of years that antidepressants are taken out of the last 5 years it can be seen that
antidepressants users on average have taken antidepressants for 2 years. It is interesting to notice
that some of the non-users of antidepressants have taken antidepressants in the past and therefore
the average of the total sample population becomes 0.268 years. A similar picture comes up for the
next variable, incidating the actual consumption of antidepressants the last 5 years. On average
antidepressant users have taken 649 DDD the last five years, whereas the non-users have taken 5
DDD on average. This brings the average for the total sample population to 74 DDD. It should be
noted that the sample size is reduced for the two above-mentioned variables, as they are used in
estimations on a smaller dataset. The final variable in table 2 is days of employment, reporting the
number of days that an individual is employed per year. The displayed mean and standard error are
only for individuals in the labour force, which explains the reduced number of observations. The
non-users of antidepressants participating in the labour force have an average number of 331
working days per year, whereas this number is slightly higher for antidepressant users with a value
of 333. However, it must be noticed that the sample of antidepressant users for this variable only
consists of 85 observations.
When summarizing the overview of descriptive statistics, it catches the eye that more than half of
the sample population is not active on the labour market. The fact that such a large part is not active
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