论文标题
是唯一对心理健康有害的孩子吗？：来自中国单子女政策的工具变量分析的证据
Is being an only child harmful to psychological health?: Evidence from an instrumental variable analysis of China's One-Child Policy
论文作者
论文摘要
本文评估了一个家庭中独生子女对心理健康的影响，并利用了中国单孩子政策的数据。我们使用一种工具变量方法来解决生育决策与心理健康之间潜在的混杂问题，在这种情况下，仪器变量是实施单子女政策强度的指数。我们在本地仪器变量方法和主分层之间建立了分析联系，以适应连续的仪器变量。在主要分层框架内，我们假设贝叶斯分层模型在调整集群数据结构的同时推断出各种政策兴趣的因果估计。我们将该方法应用于中国家族小组研究的数据，发现对某些亚群的独生子对自我报告的心理健康健康的负面影响很小但具有统计学上的显着影响。我们的分析揭示了相对于观察到的和未观察到的特征的治疗效应异质性。特别是，城市男性仅仅是儿童而遭受的痛苦最大，如果家庭对单孩子的政策具有更大的抵抗力，那么负面影响就会更大。我们还进行灵敏度分析以评估关键仪器变量假设。
This 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 on the intensity of the implementation of the One-Child 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 sensitivity analysis to assess the key instrumental variable assumption.
