The Health Implications of Social Pensions: Evidence from China’s New Rural Pension Scheme* This paper estimates the causal effect of income on health outcomes of the elderly and investigates underlying mechanisms by exploiting an income change induced by the launch of China’s New Rural Pension scheme (NRPS). Using this policy experiment, we address the endogeneity of pension income by applying...

Youth Depression and Future Criminal Behavior While the contemporaneous association between mental health problems and criminal behavior has been explored in the literature, the long-term consequences of such problems, depression in particular, have received much less attention. In this paper, we examine the effect of depression during adolescence on the probability of engaging in a number of c...

The Impact of Parental Income and Education on the Health of their Children * This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental background on child health. We are particularly concerned with the extent to which their finding that income effects on child health are the result of spurious correlation rather than some causal mechanism. A similar argument can be ma...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether isotretinoin therapy could result in deleterious ocular effects, as previously described in case report studies. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING The study was conducted using the electronic medical databases of a large health maintenance organization in Israel. PATIENTS The study population consisted of 14 682 adolescents and young adults who were n...

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the non-random distribution of teachers and students ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the health information-seeking preferences of youth with mental health challenges and their caregivers, focusing on health literacy needs related to second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs). METHODS One hundred fifty two youth and 158 caregivers attending outpatient psychiatry clinics at BC Children's Hospital between February 2009 and December 2010 completed a SGA healt...

Sheepskin or Prozac: The Causal Effect of Education on Mental Health Mental illness is associated with large costs to individuals and society. Education improves various health outcomes but little work has been done on mental illness. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of education on mental health, we rely on a rich longitudinal dataset that contains health information from childhood t...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to estimate the prevalence of possible oral corticosteroid (OCS)-related side effects and health care resource use and costs in patients with asthma. METHODS This was a cross-sectional, matched-cohort, retrospective study using a commercial claims database. Adults with asthma diagnosis codes and evidence of asthma medication use were studied. Patient...

This study includes retrenchments in unemployment insurance (UI) benefits as an understudied mechanism to investigate possible explanations for wage inequality in the labor market. Using longitudinal data from the Dutch Labor Supply Panel (OSA) over the period 1985–2000, and adopting a quasi-experimental design, we not only extend current research by asking if restrictive changes in UI benefits...