Munich Center for the Economics of Aging, Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, Amalienstr. 33, 80799 München, Germany.
Munich Center for the Economics of Aging, Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, Amalienstr. 33, 80799 München, Germany; Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, Germany; SFI, The Danish National Centre for Social Research, Denmark.
Soc Sci Med. 2014 Jan;100:1-11. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.09.003. Epub 2013 Sep 26.
This article investigates the causal relationship between the number of biological children and mental health of elderly Europeans. Specifically, we ask whether additional children improve or threaten parents' mental health status. The identification of causal effects draws on two natural experiments that exogenously increase the number of children: multiple births and the sex composition of the first two children. This setup allows us to identify the effect of expected and desired as well as the effect of unexpected additional children on mental health. For women, we find conflicting evidence regarding the effect of additional children on mental health, and we only find a negative effect of having additional children on mental health using multiple birth at the second pregnancy as instrument. Thus, it takes a rare and somewhat particular situation to uncover the negative effect. There is no evidence for a causal effect of additional children on the probability to suffer from depression for elder men.
本文研究了欧洲老年人的生物子女数量与心理健康之间的因果关系。具体来说，我们想问的是，增加子女数量是会改善还是威胁到父母的心理健康状况。因果效应的识别依赖于两个外生地增加子女数量的自然实验：多胞胎和头两个孩子的性别构成。这种设置使我们能够识别预期和期望的效果，以及意外增加的孩子对心理健康的效果。对于女性，我们发现关于增加孩子对心理健康影响的证据相互矛盾，并且只有在第二次怀孕时使用多胞胎作为工具时，我们才发现有更多孩子会对心理健康产生负面影响。因此，需要一种罕见而特殊的情况才能揭示出负面影响。没有证据表明增加子女数量会对老年男性患抑郁症的概率产生因果影响。
