Handling the endogeneity of income to health using a field experiment in Taiwan

Fu-Min Tseng and Dennis Petrie

No 263, Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics from Economic Studies, University of Dundee

Abstract: This paper uses an exogenous increase in income for a specific sub-group in Taiwan to explore the extent to which higher income leads to higher levels of health and wellbeing. In 1995, the Taiwanese government implemented the Senior Farmer Welfare Benefit Interim Regulation (SFWBIR) which was a pure cash injection, approximately US$110 (£70) per month in 1996, to senior farmers. A Difference-in-differences (DiD) approach is used on survey data from the Taiwanese Health and Living Status of Elderly in 1989 and 1996 to evaluate the short term effect of the SFWBIR on self-assessed health, depression, and life satisfaction. Senior manufacturing workers are employed as a comparison group for the senior farmers in the natural experiment because their demographic backgrounds are similar. This paper provides evidence that the increase in income from the SFWBIR significantly improved the mental health of senior farmers by reducing the scale of depression (CES-D) by 1.718, however, it had no significant short term impact on self-assessed health or life satisfaction.

Keywords: social welfare benefit; life satisfaction; mental health; natural experiment; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/media/dundeewebsite/econom ... cussion/DDPE_263.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/media/dundeewebsite/economicstudies/documents/discussion/DDPE_263.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.dundee.ac.uk/media/dundeewebsite/economicstudies/documents/discussion/DDPE_263.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Handling the endogeneity of income to health using a field experiment in Taiwan (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dun:dpaper:263

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics from Economic Studies, University of Dundee Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrzej Kwiatkowski ().