School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
School of Economics, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China and GEP China, Ningbo, China.
Health Econ. 2018 Jul;27(7):1131-1146. doi: 10.1002/hec.3661. Epub 2018 Apr 23.
This paper examines whether only children have poor vision by exploiting the quasinatural experiment generated by the Chinese One-Child Policy. The results suggest that being an only child increases the incidence of myopia by 9.1 percentage points. We further investigate the mechanisms through which being an only child affects the myopia and find that only children, as the only hope in a household, receive higher expectations in terms of academic performance and future educational attainment and pressure to succeed in life from parents, which contribute to the increased myopia. We also find that the school quality of only children is significantly higher than that of non-only children. This study provides new insights into an important health consequence of One-Child Policy in China.
本文通过利用中国独生子女政策所产生的准自然实验，考察了独生子女是否视力不佳。结果表明，作为独生子女会使近视的发病率增加 9.1 个百分点。我们进一步研究了独生子女影响近视的机制，发现作为家庭中唯一的希望，独生子女会受到父母更高的学业成绩和未来受教育程度的期望以及成功生活的压力，这导致了近视的增加。我们还发现，独生子女的学校质量明显高于非独生子女。本研究为中国独生子女政策的一个重要健康后果提供了新的见解。
