Discussion of: Mental health

In 2020, for the first time in history, entire countries underwent prolonged periods of stay-at-home orders, school closures and curfews. These policies contributed stress and disruption on top of the anxiety caused by the pandemic. Although most of us have experimented with these effects during the last two years, it remains difficult to precisely quantify them in the absence of systematic data on mental health. The first important merit of Adams-Prassl, Boneva, Golin and Rauh is to collect such data for the United States. The survey they conducted in the midst of lockdowns (March–May 2020) collected detailed information for a large sample of individuals at a monthly frequency. The second important contribution of the paper is to leverage on these unique data to identify a significant impact of stay-at-home orders on mental health. The average effect across all individuals – just less than a tenth of a standard deviation of the dependent variable – masks an important heterogeneity by gender, as the effect increases to over 12% of standard deviations for females whereas it is not significantly different from zero for males. Obvious explanations, such as a greater burden from increased childcare or differential labour market effects, do not seem to explain the difference in impact between males and females. These results call for greater attention to the gender dimension of mental distress.