Tez Türü: Doktora
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Marmara Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, İktisat (İngilizce) Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye
Tez Danışmanı: Bilge Eriş Dereli
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2025
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Özet:
| This dissertation analyses three specific aspects of mental health: (i) education, (ii) status in the labour market, and (iii) educational mismatch in line with the theories of human capital, status inconsistency and distress. Using individual-level data from the four waves of the Turkish Health Surveys, I propose hypotheses to investigate the causal impact of education on mental health, the association between different labour market positions and mental health, and the association between educational mismatch and mental health. In the first essay, I examined the causal relationship between education and mental health, considering other potential factors that may be associated with mental health. Hence, generalised linear models and quantile treatment effects are used to investigate the causal link between education and mental health across quantiles of the PHQ-8 scores, taking into account the distribution of PHQ-8 depression scores. In the second essay, I estimate the associations between status in the labour market and mental health by following psychological depression thresholds within the PHQ-8 framework. Considering the rarity of moderate and severe depression, the clog-log technique is applied after the Heckman selection process, which accounts for sample selection bias in the third essay. Our findings suggest that human capital has a positive impact on mental health, and this effect remains beneficial even in the case of overeducation. However, being undereducated is positively associated with depression, justifying stress models. Both being unemployed and being outside the labour force are negatively associated with mental health, with being outside the labour force having a larger adverse coefficient for the men sample. |