About Me
Dr Ekaterina Oparina is a Research Economist at the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE and a Research Affiliate at the Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford. She earned her PhD in Economics at the University of Surrey. She is an applied microeconomist working in health and public economics. Her research asks which mental health interventions work at scale and for whom, how public services perform when they are stretched, and how governments can use measures of wellbeing to assess policies.
Job market paper
Talking therapy: impacts of a nationwide mental health service
We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a nationwide mental health service in England for treating depression and anxiety using non-experimental data. Exploiting oversubscription and resulting exogenous variation in waiting times across areas and over time, and based on a novel dataset of over one million patients, we find that treatment significantly improves mental health and reduces impairment in work and social life. We also provide suggestive evidence of employment gains. Impacts vary across patients and services. Nevertheless, the programme is highly cost-effective. Mental health problems impose high costs but can be treated cost-effectively at scale.
