Gong Jie, Lu Yi, Xie Huihua
Department of Strategy and Policy, National University of Singapore, 15 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore 119245, Singapore.
School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
J Health Econ. 2020 May;71:102288. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2020.102288. Epub 2020 Feb 12.
A central question in human development is what causes health inequalities over the life cycle. This paper links adversity in the teen years to individuals' long-term health outcomes. We examine a mandatory rustication program, the "send-down" policy during China's Cultural Revolution, and employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact on individuals' physical and mental health outcomes 40 years later. Our results suggest that rusticated youths were more likely to develop mental disorders but not to have worse physical outcomes. Further assessing distributional effects through marginal treatment effect (MTE), we find strong heterogeneous treatment effects and selection on gains.
人类发展中的一个核心问题是，在整个生命周期中，健康不平等的成因是什么。本文将青少年时期的逆境与个人的长期健康结果联系起来。我们研究了一项强制性的下乡计划，即中国文化大革命期间的“上山下乡”政策，并采用回归断点设计来估计40年后对个人身心健康结果的影响。我们的结果表明，下乡青年更有可能患上精神障碍，但身体状况不会更差。通过边际处理效应（MTE）进一步评估分配效应，我们发现了强烈的异质性处理效应和对收益的选择。
