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

antidepressant use as an indicator of depression is connected with greater uncertainty than applying
this method to other medical treatments, because the variation in mental health care treatments is
greater. <strong>An</strong>d finally, the founding premise of a positive effect of MTX on employment can be
questioned.
In chapter 7 a further expansion of the analysis was considered, looking at an approximately
continuous variable instead of a binary explanatory variable. The estimation was performed with an
unobserved effects Tobit model and resulted in positive marginal effects that were large in
magnitude compared to the results from chapter 6. Nonetheless, the effect on the variable of interest
in the Tobit model was also insignificant, just like the results from chapter 6. It was stressed that the
analysis in chapter 7 only was a preliminary attempt to include a continuous dependent variable and
therefore the results from chapter 7 should be interpreted cautious.
Taken as a whole, the results of the presented analysis do not point towards antidepressants having
an effect on employment as found by Galarraga et al. (2006). However, as mentioned above the
empirical problems present in the analysis necessitate further analysis both with respect to the
supporting hypothesis and the possible endogeneity of the control variables. One option would be to
link the dataset to Landspatientregistret, which is a national register containing information on all
the diagnoses established in the Danish hospitals. This would provide data on the degree of
depression, but would not be without problems, as people are often diagnosed by their general
practitioner without getting in touch with a hospital. In addition, the conducted estimations could be
scrutinized further, looking into for example the effect of interaction terms or using dummies for
different dosages of antidepressants, in order to capture heterogeneous treatment effects.
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