Is being an only child harmful to psychological health?: evidence from an instrumental variable analysis of China's one‐child policy
Is being an only child harmful to psychological health?: evidence from an instrumental variable analysis of China's one‐child policy
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DOI：
10.1111/rssa.12595
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发表时间：
2020-05
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Shuxi Zeng;Fan Li;Peng Ding
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Shuxi Zeng;Fan Li;Peng Ding
本文利用中国独生子女政策的数据，评估了独生子女对心理健康的影响。我们使用工具变量方法来解决生育决策和心理健康之间潜在的无法测量的混淆，其中工具变量是政策实施强度的指数。我们在局部工具变量方法和主要分层之间建立了分析联系，以适应连续的工具变量。在主分层框架内，我们假设一个贝叶斯层次模型来推断政策兴趣的各种因果估计，同时调整聚类数据结构。我们将该方法应用到中国家庭小组研究的数据中，发现独生子女对某些亚人群自我报告的心理健康有很小但统计上显著的负面影响。我们的分析揭示了治疗效果在观察和未观察特征方面的异质性。特别是，城市男性受独生子女的影响最大，如果家庭对独生子女政策的抵抗力越强，其负面影响就越大。我们还进行了敏感性分析，以评估关键工具变量的假设。
The paper evaluates the effects of being an only child in a family on psychological health, leveraging data on the one‐child policy in China. We use an instrumental variable approach to address the potential unmeasured confounding between the fertility decision and psychological health, where the instrumental variable is an index of the intensity of the implementation of the policy. We establish an analytical link between the local instrumental variable approach and principal stratification to accommodate the continuous instrumental variable. Within the principal stratification framework, we postulate a Bayesian hierarchical model to infer various causal estimands of policy interest while adjusting for the clustering data structure. We apply the method to the data from the China Family Panel Studies and find small but statistically significant negative effects of being an only child on self‐reported psychological health for some subpopulations. Our analysis reveals treatment effect heterogeneity with respect to both observed and unobserved characteristics. In particular, urban males suffer the most from being only children, and the negative effect has larger magnitude if the families were more resistant to the one‐child policy. We also conduct a sensitivity analysis to assess the key instrumental variable assumption.