Family Socio-Economic Status, Childhood Life-Events and the Dynamics of Depression from Adolescence to Early Adulthood

This paper employs a conditional quantile regression approach to examine the roles of family SES, early childhood life-events, unobserved heterogeneity and pure state dependence in explaining the distribution of depression among adolescents and young adults using data on the children of the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79 cohort (CNLSY79). Our study also extends previous work by explicitly modelling depression dynamics during adolescence. To estimate dynamic models we integrate the ‘jittering’ approach for estimating conditional quantile models for count data with a recently-developed instrumental variable approach for the estimation of dynamic quantile regression models with fixed effects.