Reskilling and Resilience

This paper shows that effective reskilling can have profound mental health benefits for workers and their partners. Using institutional variation in access to higher education after work accidents in Denmark, we find that reskilling prevents one case of depression for every three injured workers. Strikingly, the spillover effects on partners are just as large. These mental health gains are accompanied by higher partner employment and increased separation rates, suggesting that reskilling frees partners from costly relationship commitments. Together, the mental health and partner benefits add 83% to the direct labor earnings gains from reskilling.