Danusha Jayawardana

Monash University (Australia) · Centre for Health Economics

Children’s time investments in various activities may be important for reducing socioeconomic status (SES) gaps in educational and mental health outcomes. Using detailed time use diaries of Australian children aged 4-14, we observe that children from low SES backgrounds spend more time on digital media and less time on out-of-school enrichment acti...

The prevalence of mental health disorders in young adults is increasing, yet there is limited empirical evidence on its economic consequences. We contribute to the literature by estimating the healthcare costs of psychological distress using panel data of young women (aged 18–23 years with a 5‐year follow‐up) from the Australian Longitudinal Study...

Early marriage is a manifestation of gender discrimination against girls, leading to adverse consequences on their well-being. This article contributes to the literature by examining the effects of early marriage on the mental well-being of women – an area often overlooked in research. Using nationally representative longitudinal data from Indonesi...

This study examines the heterogeneous effect of child labour on adolescent mental health using longitudinal household data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. We use legislative minimum wage as an instrument to address the endogeneity bias of child work. Results from the instrumental variable quantile estimation indicate that the effect of child...

We investigate the effect of an educational cash transfer on schooling and working of the recipients and their non-recipient siblings in Indonesia, using a matched difference-in-differences strategy. We find that the cash transfer increases the probability of schooling for all recipients. Specifically, the likelihood of schooling for the senior sec...

Background Compared with other health areas, the mental health impacts of climate change have received less research attention. The literature on climate change and mental health is growing rapidly but is characterised by several limitations and research gaps. In a field where the need for designing evidence-based adaptation strategies is urgent, a...

The Queensland Family Cohort Pilot Study follows 450 women over the course of their pregnancy and after giving birth, collecting a wealth of information on socioeconomic characteristics, health, healthcare use and biological samples. The focus of this paper is to demonstrate how these data may be used to measure inequality of opportunity, between a...

Child labour is a global issue which creates a need for evidence-based interventions such as cash and in-kind transfers. However, there is limited evidence about the effect of in-kind transfers on child labour, impeding policy development. We address this gap by examining the impacts of an unconditional in-kind transfer, a nation-wide subsidised ri...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, specific mental health telehealth services in Australia have been an important source of help for the increasingly stressed population. This study examined trends in the uptake of telehealth items for mental health during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic using administrative Medicare data. During the peak of...

The objective of this study is to identify the short and long-run determinants of inflation in Sri Lanka. It follows an eclectic approach to seeking possible determinants of inflation and employs an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to test for co integration between inflation and its causes. The findings indicate that i...