arXiv 18 May 2020 · Statistics — Applications · publishedJournal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society) (2020) · 20 citations (OpenAlex)
arXiv:2005.09130 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
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.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heckman, J. J. and Vytlacil, E. J (1999) Local instrumental variables and latent variable models for identifying and bounding treatment effects, Proceedings of the Natio… | 0.928 | 4 | 3 | 100% |
| 2 | Attane, I (2002) China's family planning policy: an overview of its past and future, Studies in Family Planning\/, 33, 103–113 | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 3 | Angrist, J. D., Imbens, G. W., and Rubin, D. B (1996) Identification of causal effects using instrumental variables (with discussion), Journal of the American statistical Association… | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 4 | Wu, L (2014) Are Only Children Worse Off on Subjective Well-Being?: Evidence from China's One-Child Policy\/, Ph.D | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Frangakis, C. E. and Rubin, D. B (2002) Principal stratification in causal inference, Biometrics\/, 58, 21–29 | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Heckman, J. J. and Vytlacil, E (2001) Policy-relevant treatment effects, American Economic Review\/, 91, 107–111 | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Huang, W., Lei, X., and Sun, A (2020) Fertility Restrictions and Life-Cycle Outcomes: Evidence from the One-Child Policy in China, Review of Economics and Statistics\… | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Cameron, L., Erkal, N., Gangadharan, L., and Meng, X (2013) Little emperors: behavioral impacts of China's One-Child Policy, Science\/, 339, 953–957 | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
| 9 | Ebenstein, A (2010) missing girls | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Huang, W., Lei, X., and Zhao, Y (2016) One-child policy and the rise of man-made twins, Review of Economics and Statistics\/, 98, 467–476 | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 59 scored citations.