Background: Psychiatric comorbidity is frequent among persons with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Whether pharmacological treatment of ADHD influences the incidence of psychiatric comorbidity is uncertain.
Objective: To investigate associations and causal relations between pharmacological treatment of ADHD and incidence of subsequent comorbid psychiatric diagnoses.
ADHD is associated with an increased risk of injury. Causal evidence for effects of pharmacological treatment on injuries is scarce. We estimated effects of ADHD medication on injuries using variation in provider preference as an instrumental variable (IV).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe allocation of public care services should be determined by individual needs, but can be influenced by economic factors. This paper examines the impact of economic incentives on the allocation of public nursing home care in the Norwegian long-term care system. In Norway, municipalities and city districts have economic incentives for choosing nursing home care for high-income individuals in need of care and home-based care in sheltered housing for low-income individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Compulsory mental health care includes compulsory hospitalisation and outpatient commitment with medication treatment without consent. Uncertain evidence of the effects of compulsory care contributes to large geographical variations and a controversy on its use. Some argue that compulsion can rarely be justified and should be reduced to an absolute minimum, while others claim compulsion can more frequently be justified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry
April 2024
Objective: Criminality rates are higher among persons with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and evidence that medication reduces crime is limited. Medication rates between clinics vary widely even within universal health care systems, partly because of providers' treatment preferences. We used this variation to estimate causal effects of pharmacological treatment of ADHD on 4-year criminal outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchool teachers' sickness absence has been shown to affect student achievement in the short run. However, we know little about whether socioeconomic backgrounds may compensate for reductions in instructional quality and to what extent teacher absence effects persist over time. This paper examines the socioeconomic differences in the short- and long-term effects of teacher absence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur Child Adolesc Psychiatry
September 2023
Rates of ADHD diagnosis vary across regions in many countries. However, no prior study has investigated how much within-country geographic variation in ADHD diagnoses is explained by variation in ADHD symptom levels. We examine whether ADHD symptom levels explain variation in ADHD diagnoses among children and adolescents using nationwide survey and register data in Norway.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSickness absence entails large individual and societal costs. Dialogue Meetings (DMs) where the absentee, the employer, and the physician discuss arrangements for full or partial work resumption have been in place in Norway since 2007. In collaboration with the Labour and Welfare Administration, we conducted a large-scale, pre-registered, randomized field experiment to evaluate aspects of the Norwegian DMs policy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Preference-based instrumental variables (PP IV) designs can identify causal effects when patients receive treatment due to variation in providers' treatment preference. We offer a systematic review and methodological assessment of PP IV applications in health research.
Study Design And Setting: We included studies that applied PP IV for evaluation of any treatment in any population in health research (PROSPERO: CRD42020165014).
Introduction: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is among the most common mental disorders in children and adolescents, and it is a strong risk factor for several adverse psychosocial outcomes over the lifespan. There are large between-country and within-country variations in diagnosis and medication rates. Due to ethical and practical considerations, a few studies have examined the effects of receiving a diagnosis, and there is a lack of research on effects of medication on long-term outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe estimate the effect of family size on various measures of labor market outcomes over the whole career until retirement, using instrumental variables estimation in data from Norwegian administrative registers. Parents' number of children is instrumented with the sex mix of their first two children. We find that having additional children causes sizable reductions in labor supply for women, which fade as children mature and even turn positive for women without a college degree.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn many countries, general practitioners (GPs) are assigned the task of controlling the validity of their own patients' insurance claims. At the same time, they operate in a market where patients are customers free to choose their GP. Are these roles compatible? Can we trust that the gatekeeping decisions are untainted by private economic interests? Based on administrative registers from Norway with records on sick pay certification and GP-patient relationships, we present evidence to the contrary: GPs are more lenient gatekeepers the more competitive is the physician market, and a reputation for lenient gatekeeping increases the demand for their services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBased on administrative register data from Norway, we examine the impact of hours of daylight on sick-leave absences among workers. Our preferred estimates imply that an additional hour of daylight increases the daily entry rate to absenteeism by 0.5 percent and the corresponding recovery rate by 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Health Econ
December 2013
Using administrative data from Norway, we examine the extent to which family doctors influence their clients' propensity to claim sick-pay. The analysis exploits exogenous switches of family doctors occurring when physicians quit, retire, or for other reasons sell their patient lists. We find that family doctors have significant influence on their clients' absence behavior, particularly on absence duration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relationship between retirement and mortality is studied with a unique administrative data set covering the full population of Norway. A series of retirement policy changes in Norway reduced the retirement age for a group of workers but not for others. Difference-in-differences estimation based on monthly birth cohorts and treatment group status show that the early retirement programme significantly reduced the retirement age; this holds true also when we account for programme substitution, for example into the disability pension.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBased on comprehensive administrative register data from Norway, we examine the determinants of sickness absence behavior; in terms of employee characteristics, workplace characteristics, panel doctor characteristics, and economic conditions. The analysis is based on a novel concept of a worker's steady state sickness absence propensity, computed from a multivariate hazard rate model designed to predict the incidence and duration of sickness absence for all workers. Key conclusions are that (i) most of the cross-sectional variation in absenteeism is caused by genuine employee heterogeneity; (ii) the identity of a person's panel doctor has a significant impact on absence propensity; (iii) sickness absence insurance is frequently certified for reasons other than sickness; and (iv) the recovery rate rises enormously just prior to the exhaustion of sickness insurance benefits.
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