Effects of mental illness on the labor supply of family members: analysis of Japanese anonymized data

The main aim of this study is to examine the causal effect of mental illness on the labor supply of family members. Our main purpose is to determine how family members address the burden and hardships that mental illness imposes on the patient and family. We analyze a unique Japanese anonymized data set collected from individual households. We find that, after matching, there is no significant difference in the means of the weekly work hours of family members between the treated and the untreated groups. In contrast to the US and the UK, in Japanese households we do not observe significant labor market effects of mental illness on family members. Our results might have been caused by different social situations and cultural norms across countries.