Earnings Gaps for Conspicuous Characteristics: Evidence from Indonesia

Recent research has begun to analyze the effects of height on earnings in Indonesia, a developing country with a large population. Little has been done on the potential effects of weight and general health status on earnings. Using a household production function, Grossman and Benham (1974) provide empirical evidence of the positive effect of good health on earnings. Carefully accounting for selection into the workforce and the potential endogeneity of our health variables, we use a sample of individuals between the ages of 25 and 55 from the Indonesian Family Longitudinal Survey (IFLS) to identify the effect of health on earnings and conduct Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to identify possible discrimination. We compare these results to those using less conspicuous health measures such as blood pressure, cholesterol, and chest pain. Endogeneity of our health measures is subsequently addressed using several econometric methodologies. Results suggest that overweight males in Indonesia earn an income premium, while underweight females are subject to an income penalty.     

Overweight Adolescents and On-time High School Graduation: Racial and Gender Disparities

Obesity among U.S. adolescents ages 12–19 rose from 4.6% in 1963–1965 to 17.4% in 2003–2004. This paper contributes to the literature on the impact of unhealthy body mass index (BMI) on health (e.g., obesity) and human capital (e.g., schooling) investments of adolescents. We use the propensity score method to study 8,388 individuals who responded to survey Waves I through III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), for students in grades 7–12. We estimate an economic model that captures longer-term effects of BMI categories (obesity and overweight separately) on on-time (dichotomous) high school graduation. We control for characteristics at the individual, household, and community levels. Baseline probit regression estimates were improved upon by using matching estimators (propensity scores yield consistent estimate of the average treatment on the treated) based on the nearest neighbor and the more robust kernel density weighting schemes. Results from both full and reduced models suggest no adverse impact of overweight or obesity on timely high school completion for males, but a significant average negative effect on females. Investigating disparities in effects across both gender and race, we isolate the adverse effects primarily to white and Asian females. No significant effects were found for African-Americans. One of the novel contributions of our research is that the significant effects of gender- and race- specific adolescent obesity and overweight conditions reach beyond high school GPA standing to also impact on-time high school graduation status.     

The effect of education on health and health behaviors: Evidence from the college enrollment expansion in China

By exploiting the massive college enrollment expansion in China beginning in 1999, we investigate the effect of higher education on health and health behaviors. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies in 2018 and employing an instrumental variable approach, we find that higher education has a significant effect on health and health behaviors. Each additional year of education increases the probability of reporting good health and having good memory by 1.9 and 3.1 percentage points (pp), respectively. Moreover, it decreases the probability of being overweight, smoking, and drinking by 1.3, 2.3, and 1.2 pp., respectively. By comparing the effect size with the findings in previous literature, we conclude that the effect of education on health is greater at higher levels of education. Further analysis suggests that education may affect health and health behaviors through two channels: the resources acquired by individuals and the prices faced by them.     

Are smokers too optimistic about their health status: Ex ante perception versus ex post observation

As the world has moved toward the era of non-communicable diseases, whether the individuals are in a capable position to accurately evaluate their own health status has an important implication on disease prevention in particularly and population health outcome in general. In this paper, we address four important questions surrounding the accuracy of health perception: (1) to what extent that individuals can make an accurate evaluation on their own health status; (2) what are the major factors influencing health misperception if any; (3) what are the causal directions between health behavior and health perception; and (4) whether individuals can learn and update their self-evaluation on health status over time and whether such learning is productive in that it mitigates the health misperception. Specifically, we use a longitudinal data set obtained from Taiwan that covers six waves of survey over about twenty-year period to compare the ex ante subjective perception on health and the ex post mortality hazards. Our results suggest that over one third of the survey respondents are not performing well in the evaluation of their own health status. We also find that smokers are more likely to have an optimistic bias on their own health assessment as compared to nonsmokers. After controlling for the simultaneous causality problem, we find a causal effect of individuals' misperceptions on continuing smoking, but not vice versa. In addition, our results show that individuals update their subjective perception on health over time through the learning from personal health shocks and the provision of public information on smoking hazards. Although the learning process tends to be overshooting among smokers, it is beneficial to mitigate the optimistic bias. We also find the evidence that personal health shock has a stronger impact on updating behavior than public information, indicating that personal experience is a more effective channel through which to correct the bias in health perception, compared to the provision of public information, such as anti-smoking campaign.     

Surviving the Famine Unscathed? An Analysis of the Long‐Term Health Effects of the Great Chinese Famine

We study the long‐term health effects of the Chinese Famine of 1959–1961 on five cohorts of individuals exposed to it at different stages of their early lives. Based on a 2011 national survey, we use instrumental variables to estimate the impact of the Famine on various health and lifestyle indicators for the whole sample and for the female and male subsamples separately. We have found some negative effects of Famine exposure: (i) for the whole sample, Famine exposure reduced adult height for two out of five cohorts; (ii) for both the female and the male subsamples, Famine exposure reduced adult height in one cohort; and on the whole the reduction was larger for males. We have also found in the subsample that Famine exposure was associated with (i) a higher risk of having hypertension in one cohort for females; (ii) a higher likelihood of smoking in one male cohort; and (iii) a higher probability of consuming alcohol in one cohort for males. Finally, we have not found a statistically significant association between Famine exposure and the risk of being overweight or underweight, having diabetes or other chronic diseases, having depression.     

Memory utility,food consumption and obesity

Introducing the concept of memory utility, we explore the effect of memory capacity on overweight and weight control by building a theoretical model and conducting related empirical research with a double-hurdle model. The result shows that better memory capacity can lead to a higher probability of overweight due to the higher discount rate and more food consumption when this person is not obese; while it helps the overweight individuals to lose weight due to memory disutility from obesity. The different effects of memory result from the tradeoff between memory utility from food consumption and memory disutility from obesity.     

Retirement and health: Evidence from China

One typical feature of China's pension system is that retirement is mandatory. By exploiting the exogenous change created by this mandatory retirement policy, we use the mandatory retirement age as an instrument for retirement status to examine the effect of retirement on individual health using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). Our main finding is that the probability of “fair” or “poor” self-reported health among white-collar workers decreases by 34 percentage point after retirement. This result is generally robust to different model specifications, alternative measures of health, and different subsamples. In addition, we deliver evidence that increased health-related exercises and the cultivation of a better lifestyle are two possible channels through which retirement affects health.     

One-child policy and childhood obesity

This paper investigates the effect of only children on childhood obesity in China. We use implementation measures of family planning policies as instrumental variables in the estimations, and find that being raised in a one-child family significantly increases the weight, body mass index, and probability of being overweight or obese for children. By examining mothers' care-taking behaviors and their children's dietary habits and nutritional intake, we identify the following channels linking one-child families with childhood obesity. (a) In one-child families, parents prefer spending money to using their time to care for their children. (b) In one-child families, children eat more high-sugar, high-fat, and high-protein food. A time–money trade-off could be a plausible mechanism of the effects we document.     

Tattoos,Employment, and Labor Market Earnings: Is There a Link in the Ink?

The popularity of tattooing has increased substantially in recent years, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Moreover, tattooed images are permanent unless the individual opts for expensive, time consuming, and painful removal procedures. Given the increasing popularity of tattooing, and the permanent nature of this action, it is of interest to know whether tattooed workers are more or less likely to be employed and, conditional on employment, if they receive wages that are different from the wages of their non‐tattooed peers. To investigate these questions, we analyze two large data sets—from the United States and Australia—with measures of tattoo status, employment, earnings, and other pertinent variables. Regardless of country, gender, specific measures, or estimation technique, the results consistently show that having a tattoo is negatively and significantly related to employment and earnings in bivariate analyses, but the estimates become smaller and nonsignificant after controlling for human capital, occupation, behavioral choices, lifestyle factors, and other individual characteristics related to labor market outcomes. Various robustness checks confirm the stability of the core findings. These results suggest that, once differences in personal characteristics are taken into account, tattooed and non‐tattooed workers are treated similarly in the labor market. We offer suggestions for improving future surveys to enable a better understanding of the relationships between tattooed workers and their labor market outcomes.     

Gender peer effects on students’ educational and occupational expectations

To date, little is known about how gender peers affect students’ educational and occupational expectations. This study investigates the gender peer effects on students’ educational and occupational expectations, using the 2014 China Education Panel Survey. To address students’ self-selection into classes, we choose a sample of schools that randomly assign students to classes. We find that exposure to more female peers increases students’ probability of expecting to attend university and reduces their probability of expecting to complete only middle school. Besides, exposure to more female peers increases boys’ and girls’ probabilities of expecting to pursue a career as a manager, and reduces their probabilities of expecting to become a teacher, doctor, or lawyer. Moreover, exposure to more female peers has significant positive effects on both girls’ and boys’ probability of expecting to pursue prevalently male occupations. In addition, we discuss the mechanisms and check the robustness of the results. This study helps to understand the gender peer effects in education and the variations in individuals’ educational and occupational choices.     

Too old to plan? Age identity and financial planning among the older population of China

We study how age identity (measured by the difference between chronological age and perceived old age), influences financial planning among the older population (60+) in China. Using data from three waves of the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey, we show that individuals who feel younger have a significantly higher probability of making financial plans. That such an effect exists in sub-samples divided by age and retirement status implies the relevance of financial planning even for individuals with advanced ages. It is consistent with the hypothesis that old individuals who feel younger have higher perceived cognitive abilities and hence higher motivation to make financial plans. However, an unfavorable perception of social aging culture moderates such a positive effect. Age identity can further impact the downstream economic behaviors of saving and investing, either directly or indirectly, through financial planning. Finally, a younger age identity also increases an individual's willingness to internalize the responsibility of eldercare. Our findings imply that it is important to consider individuals' age identity when crafting and implementing old-age policies.     

医保支付方式与乡村医生行为

长期以来，我国农村地区的初级医疗保健服务由乡村医生提供，然而新农合制度以按服务付费为主的支付方式导致了乡村医生供应短缺、行为扭曲等一系列供方市场问题，进而严重制约了农村地区初级医疗保健服务体系建设与社会福利提升。基于改革医保支付方式是从供方角度合理控制医疗成本的有效措施这一基本前提，文章通过构建理论模型，分析了按服务付费、按人头付费、固定工资，以及混合付费等四种支付方式下乡村医生给予不同疾病状态患者的治疗数量、治疗质量，以及职业道德的决策问题。考虑新农合与城乡居民医保制度的地区差异性、发展不均衡等特点，研究发现：（1）无论政府采用哪一种支付方式，都无法一次性将医生行为调控至最优期望目标，通过支付方式的选择与优化来调控医生行为需要与医保发展阶段相互匹配；（2）作为主要行为指标，医生给予患者的治疗数量与治疗质量之间存在反比关系，医生职业道德与患者疾病状态之间也呈现类似反比关系；（3）随着医保体系的不断完善，激励方式合理的混合支付可能是调控医生行为的一种占优选择。在城乡居民医保制度整合背景下，文章将为如何通过改革乡村医生支付方式来控制医疗成本提供一定理论支撑。     

Does children’s marriage matter for parents' mental health？Evidence from China

How to effectively alleviate mental disorders among elderly individuals is an important issue. Children are important financial and spiritual supporters of parents. However, whether there are upward spillovers from children to parents remains understudied. Using the instrumental variable (IV) method and data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper estimates the causal effect of children's marriage on the mental health of older parents. The IV estimation results demonstrate that having unmarried children is associated with a significant deterioration in parental mental health, especially in older, less educated, poor and male groups. Further evidence suggests that having unmarried children leads to significant changes in parents' economic behaviors, including labor supply, consumption, and savings; this indicates that parents are more likely to actively respond to their children’s unmarried status by increasing labor supply, reducing consumption and increasing savings rather than by engaging in negative behaviors.     

The impact of education on health in China

In this paper, we investigate the causal effect of education on health using an instrumental variable approach. The instruments we employ consist of two institutional changes in China that generated discontinuities in educational attainment among individuals. To ensure the validity of the instruments and obtain prudent conclusions, we adopt more restrictive identification tests than previous studies. The results indicate no causal impact of education on either perceived health or anthropometric health. With regard to the impact of education on male health behavior, namely smoking, we cannot provide conclusive results due to a violation of the exogeneity of our instruments. Nevertheless, we can confirm that education has no causal effect on female health behavior. To overcome the widely documented shortage of quasi-experimental identification, we also employ spouse's education as an alternative instrument to examine the causal effect of education. Identical results are obtained, with the exception that the impact of education on the reduction of overweight among women becomes significant. We conclude that this provides some evidence of a causal impact of education on health.     

THE IMPACT OF HEALTH ON POVERTY: EVIDENCE FROM THE SOUTH AFRICAN INTEGRATED FAMILY SURVEY

This paper examines the impact of health status on poverty status, accounting for the endogeneity of health status. Using exogenous measures of health status from the South African Integrated Health Survey, we instrument for health status while allowing for covariation among the unobservables influencing both health and household poverty status. Health status, as captured by the body mass index, is shown to strongly influence poverty status. Households that contain more unhealthy individuals are 60 per cent more likely to be income poor than households that contain fewer unhealthy individuals, and this finding appears invariant to the choice of poverty line.     

Birth order effects and parenting behaviors

While it is well known that there are systematic birth order effects on life cycle outcomes, there is less consensus about underlying channels and mechanisms of birth order effects. We find negative birth order effects among Chinese adolescents, favoring earlier-born children within household in academic achievement, cognitive skill measures, and in parenting behaviors including harsh parenting and parental investment. We highlight harsh parenting as a novel channel of birth order effects, in which earlier-born children are less likely to be physically punished by their parents. Heterogeneity analysis results are consistent with parents reinforcing academic advantage of better-performing earlier-born children, but do not support resource dilution, son preference, or reputation concerns as primary mechanisms underlying birth order effects. Our findings are in contrast to positive birth order effects found among earlier generations of Chinese siblings reported in the literature.     

The Impact of Housing Prices on Health in the United States Before,During, and After the Great Recession

We estimate the effects of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area housing prices on a variety of health outcomes and health-related behaviors separately for homeowners and tenants. The constructed data set consists of information on individuals from the 2002–2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System combined with homeownership data from the March Current Population Survey and housing prices from Freddie Mac. We estimate positive effects on homeowners' mental health when housing prices increase. We also find negative effects on tenants' health and health-related behaviors with increases in housing prices. These estimated contemporaneous effects are concentrated among low-income homeowners and tenants, and the effects for tenants are not persistent in the long run. However, the cumulative effects of an increase in housing prices on obesity become more pronounced for homeowners in the long run, resulting in worse self-reported health.     

Feeling Richer or Poorer than Others: A Cross‐section and Panel Analysis of Subjective Economic Status in Indonesia*

This paper examines what makes us feel richer or poorer than others. It investigates cross‐sectional and longitudinal determinants of individuals’ subjective economic status in Indonesia. Using two waves of Indonesian Family Life Surveys, 1997 and 2000, I show that individuals’ perceptions of where they are on the economic scale are more dependent on a number of socioeconomic characteristics, as well as their attitudes towards their future economic status, than their current spending capacities would suggest. I also find significant, albeit weaker, expenditure and income effects on individuals’ subjective economic status once individual fixed effects are controlled for in the regression.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF GRADE ATTAINMENT IN LOW‐INCOME COUNTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL BANGLADESH

This paper presents an econometric analysis of the effects of child health on school enrollment and grade attainment in Bungladesh. It improves on past studies in a number of ways mainly by incorporating into its analysis the endogenous nature of child health. The results challenge the conclusions found in the literature. First, it finds that in Bangladesh, a child's health and his/her probability of being enrolled in school are at best weakly related. Second, it shows that once enrolled, nutritional deficiencies retard substantially school progress: Underweight children tend to be in lower grades than well‐fed children of the same age. It is estimated that a one standard deviation improvement in weight‐for‐age would be expected to reduce the grades behind by about 0.25 years or about 13.5 percent of the actual years completed. Finally, the estimates suggest that the weight‐for‐age indicator appears as the best predictor of nutritional status.     

The clinton health reform

There are some difficult, even some agonizing tradeoffs, that we have to confront if we want to achieve the objectives of universal coverage and cost containment set forth in the Clinton plan. Will universal coverage lead to uniform results? If we mandate coverage, who is actually going to be paying for it and in what form? Do targeted subsidies based on nonincome classifications of individuals (i.e., employment status) create more distortion than equity? A concern to focus on is whether the Clinton plan will be controlling health care spending or an individual's ability to spend for their choice of health care.