Health, Enterprise, and Labor Complementarity in the Household

Relationship between Internet Use and Negative Affect

While positive emotions like happiness and life satisfaction have received great attention, how to eliminate negative affect is largely neglected. This study contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between Internet use and people's negative affect. Unlike previous studies that consider only one indicator, we capture negative affect from different dimensions by considering loneliness, sadness, and life hardship. We employ an endogenous ordered probit model to address the selection bias of Internet use and analyze the 20,107 individual-level samples sourced from the 2020 China Family Panel Studies survey. The results show that Internet use significantly reduces people's loneliness, sadness, and life hardship. We also find that studying online and watching short videos would increase people's loneliness feeling and shopping online deepens people's life hardship. In contrast, using WeChat significantly reduces sadness and life hardship. Our findings confirm that guiding people to use the Internet appropriately is necessary to reduce negative affect and improve the quality of their life.

Air Pollution, Health Shocks and Labor Mobility

The health shocks caused by air pollution seriously interfere with people’s economic life. Based on the air pollution index and health shock index calculated by the principal component entropy weight method, this article analyzes the impact of air pollution on labor mobility, and adopts the mediation effect model to test the mediation effect of health shocks, using the threshold model to analyze the time and the health shocks threshold effect of air pollution on labor mobility. Its conclusions are as follows: (1) Air pollution has a negative impact on the net inflow of labor mobility, and the net inflow of labor mobility decreases between 24.9% and 44.7% on average for each unit increase in the health shocks of air pollution. (2) The impact of air pollution on labor mobility is all caused by health shocks; the health shocks are also an important factor influencing the decrease in the labor mobility supply across provinces, and the different health levels of the migrating individuals due to air pollution. (3) The health shocks of air pollution have a single-time threshold effect on labor mobility, and the health shocks of air pollution in China have intensified after 2010, confirming that China’s Lewis turning point was 2010. (4) The attraction effect of stable and higher regional real income will partially offset the repulsion effect of health shocks of air pollution on labor mobility, when the health-shocks index of air pollution exceeds the threshold value of 1.9873. Finally, the policy implications of the health shocks of air pollution on labor mobility are also formulated.

Do Double-Edged Swords Cut Both Ways? The Role of Technology Innovation and Resource Consumption in Environmental Regulation and Economic Performance

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is one of the significant regions with the strongest economic vitality in China. This study focuses on environmental regulation in the eleven Greater Bay Area cities to explore the relationship between it and economic performance for the period 2000-2016. In doing so, we employ spatial panel models (including the spatial instrumental variable method) to investigate the nonlinear relationship between economic growth and environmental regulation. We confirm the existence of a U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental regulation in the Greater Bay Area. In the first half of the inverted U shape, the higher the economic development level, the stronger the environmental regulation strength; however, the latter begins to decrease after the peak point. The doubled-edged sword does not cut both ways. This paper verifies that technology innovation and resource consumption are two important mechanisms. Further, we find that both economic growth and environmental regulation have negative spatial externalities; innovation has a positive impact on the environmental regulation of the local city as well as surrounding cities, while resource consumption is on the contrary. In conclusion, this paper provides policy recommendations to further promote economic growth and environmental technologies, and to enhance energy efficiency in GBA.

Impacts of adult illness on employment outcomes of rural households in India

Background

Existing literature on the impacts of adult illness on household labour supply and income in low- and middle-income countries shows that adverse health conditions significantly affect household labour supply, work participation and earnings. Most of the studies, however, are not equipped to distinguish between short- and long-term consequences of adult illness. We measured the impact of adult illness on household employment outcomes both in the short- and the long-run, using a unique longitudinal data set from rural India.

Methods

We used two waves of India Human Development Survey (1993-94 and 2004-05) with a balanced panel of 10 726 households to assess short-run (in the year of the occurrence of adult illness) and long-run (after 11 years of the occurrence of adult illness) effects of major illness of adult household members aged 15-64 years on household employment outcomes, using multiple matching methods: nearest-neighbor matching and inverse probability weighting following propensity score matching, and coarsened exact matching to compare employment outcomes to a set of matched control households.

Results

Rural households affected by adult illness experienced declines in workforce participation rate by 1-3%, wage employment by 4-15 days, and wage-earnings by Indian Rupee (INR) 374 to INR 837 compared to the matched control households in the short-run. In response, adult non-sick members of the affected households increased their workforce participation sharply by 14-16% to compensate for shortfalls in the short-run. In the long-run, workforce participation rate of the affected households also declined by nearly 1-3%. The long-run declines in wage-days and wage-earnings were small and not always statistically significant across the methods. However, long-run workforce participation rate of non-sick adults were smaller (4-6%) compared to short-run, but still statistically significant.

Conclusions

The long-term effects were smaller in absolute magnitude than those of the short-run. This suggests coping and adjustments by the affected households using this 11-year longer time-span in a manner that helps to ameliorate the immediate impacts of adult illness. Our study also reiterates the importance of improving financial access to health services as well as access to social security benefits for the illness-affected households in rural India both in the short- and long-run.

Returns to Treatment in the Formal Health Care Sector: Evidence from Tanzania

Improving access to the formal health care sector is a primary public health goal in many low-income countries. But the returns to this access are unclear, given that the quality of care at public health facilities is often considered inadequate. We exploit temporal and geographic variation in the cost of traveling to formal sector health facilities to show that treatment at these facilities improves short-term health outcomes for acutely ill children in Tanzania. Our results suggest that these improvements are driven in part by more timely receipt of and better adherence to antimalarial treatment.