Globalisation and Mental Well-being

By Björn Thor Arnarson, Asker Nygaard Christensen, Beata S Javorcik and Jakob R Munch

Interactions with business partners in distant countries necessitate working across time zones and hence outside traditional working hours, which can take a toll on the mental well-being of workers. This effect is likely to be stronger for (i) women who juggle professional and family obligations, and (ii) workers in occupations requiring contacts with others. These hypotheses are investigated using matched employer-employee data from Denmark merged with information on workers’ use of prescription antidepressants (AD) and firms’ import and export transactions. The analysis exploits variation within job spells and controls for both unobservable firm-year heterogeneity and for the average differential in annual AD use among men and women. The results indicate that a decline in the business hour overlap between a Danish firm and its foreign trading partners leads to an increased AD use among women relative to men. This effect is economically meaningful, largest for college educated workers under 45 and more pronounced for single mothers. In addition to the gender effect, workers in occupations requiring establishing relationships with others are more strongly affected than those in other occupations.