half of the respondents were asked about their experiences with conflicts, deaths, and shocks before the questions on depression, while the other half were asked about their experiences with these adverse events _after_ the questions on depression.

Even though previous studies find a clear relationship between adverse events and depression, it is hard to identify whether depression is caused primarily by shocks or lower income. Lund et al. (2010) conduct a meta-analysis on the relationship between poverty and depression in low and middle income countries, and find a positive association between poverty and depression in many studies. <mark>Distinguishing whether poverty or adverse events affect mental health and economic activities has important policy implications. If the primary causal link is that low incomes leads to deteriorating mental health, then interventions such as cash transfers and access to credit are likely to be effective. O</mark> n the other hand, if depression is caused solely by experiencing shocks, interventions that focus on treating depression can be more effective. Although the linkages between poverty, adverse events and depression are difficult to disentagle, this study will examine these linkages and attempt to provide some insights on their relative magnitudes. Through the analysis, we can provide prelimiary guidance on the most effective policy interventions to combat the negative effects.

Furthermore, poverty, adverse events and depression have the potential to be endogenous. For example, people may have fallen into poverty as a result of adverse events or depression. In addition, people may be more strongly impacted by negative shocks because they were already poor or had mental health problems. Although the endogeneity between poverty, adverse events and depression cannot be fully controlled, this study attempts to address the problem by investigating the effects of lagged consumption expenditures from the previous wave of the survey (2012-13) and the experience of adverse events after lagged consumption was observed (between the second and third waves of the survey) on the current level of depression. As GHS-Panel is a panel survey, consumption expenditure information is available from three waves of the survey (2011-12, 2012-13, 2015-16) for the same set of interviewed households.

The results of our analysis suggest that experiencing conflict or idiosyncratic shocks has a significant impact on self-reported level of depression (higher CES-D scores), as well as an increased probability of having depressive symptoms. These results remain consistent when controlling for covariates such as past consumption expenditures. Experience of conflicts in the past two years has the largest and strongest impact on the respondent’s depressive symptomology, as it is associated with a 15.3 percentage point increase in the probability of reporting depression.

After establishing the potential causes of depression, we further examine how depression affects household decision making and well-being. Our results indiciate that individual depression is associated with lower labor force participation and child educational investment. Persons with depressive symptoms have a lower likelihood of engaging in any work, particularly in agricultural work (for men) and non-farm work (for women). Finally, parental depression is correlated with a lower likelihood that the family spends any money on education for their children.

We also go a step further to examine measurement and reporting of depression in household surveys. We conducted a survey experiment testing priming effects on depression reporting by randomizing the order in which respondents were asked about negative events and depressive 3