What we know about the education and mental health
What are the impacts of preschool and school environments on the mental health of students? This lecture will focus on causal evidence from North America and Europa using empirically robust methods that allow to recover the causal effects of different interventions.
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Rita Ginja
Professor
Department of Economics, UiB
This presentation will provide a review of the impacts of preschool and school environments on the mental health of students. It will focus on evidence mostly on causal evidence from North America and Europa. The studies presented use empirically robust methods that allow to recover the causal effects of different interventions.
The lecture will start by presenting new evidence on intergenerational correlations in mental health. Second, it will cover studies on both targeted and universal preschool interventions in the US, UK and Norway. Third, it will turn to present the most recent evidence on the role of school quality and peers on the mental health of adolescents. Finally, it will discuss the impacts of school-based health interventions.
Rita Ginja works on the fields of labor, public, health, family, education and development economics. Her work combines state-of-the art statistical analysis mostly using reduced-form techniques, but also structural approach in some of her papers. She has been using unique register data from several countries (Norway, Sweden, Mexico, Chile and UK) but also survey data. She has worked on the impacts of early interventions, health insurance policies, family-related policies, school quality and family-based anti-poverty interventions policies.
Ginja has contributed for the literature on early investments in children and impact of income shocks on parental investments. Her work on the medium and long-term impacts of the Head Start (a preschool program for poor children in the USA) has been featured at the Economist, the Vox, and used by US policymakers (being cited at the 2016 Economic Report of the US President). Her work on the Sure Start (UK’s version of Sure Start) has been widely cited by the UK media and will have significant impact on the field as noticeable by the number of citations of the working paper (Cattan et al., 2019, IFS Report).
