The Study On Health Problem Of Urban Residents

Chinese economy has experienced high-speed growth for 30 years,and cities in China also have been in the fast-developed stage of urbanization since 1922 as the size of the urban population is expanding.The urbanization rate rose from 36%in 2000 to over 50%for the first time in 2010,and then the urbanization rate of permanent residents in China exceeded 60%for the first time in 2019.Economic growth has driven changes in all aspects of urban development,and the most important carrier of a city is the people living in the city.Therefore,urban development is closely related to the life and welfare of citizens.The rapid development of the city enables citizens to the benefits of economies of scale,such as the diversity of products,diversified high quality service,convenient transportation,etc.,but also may produces adverse effect to the people living in cities,for example there may be severe air pollution problem caused by congestion,rising house prices,as well as the city’s public health and so on a series of practical problems.This thesis studies the public health problems in cities and tries to answer how some of the factors and policies in urban development will affect urban residents.An emerging literature studies the effects of housing prices on individual life satisfaction,physical health,psychological and mental health using data from developed countries.The results are inconclusive depending on sample,method,and individual groups and most of the studies have not addressed well the endogeneity issue that happy or healthy people may move to cities with rising housing prices.We use the individual level panel data sets,the 2010,2012,2014,and 2016 China Family Panel Survey data,to estimate the causal effects of fluctuated housing prices on urban residents’ subjective happiness and life satisfaction,self-reported health,and mental health by controlling for individual fixed effects and further applying Instrument Variable estimation.Using the lagged planned land supply as an instrumental variable of average housing price,we find a significant negative effects of housing price on happiness and mental health,even for home owners.We examined nearly all the channels that have been discussed in previous studies,but find no systematic evidence of wealth effect,for example changing health risk behaviors,labor supply and leisure decisions,medical expenditure.Based on the differential background of housing demand in China,we propose that it is the unsatisfied household housing demand that generate the negative effect of rising housing price.The second part of this thesis investigates the impact of the reform of maternal leave policy in urban labor market on children’s long-term health conditions and human capital accumulation.Using the the data of China Household Income Program and 2010 census data,we identify the causal effect of policy reform implemented on 1 September,1988 in China,which extended the duration of paid maternal leave from 56 days to 90 days,on children’s health and education outcomes based on the RD-DID setup.The results show that extending the maternal leave improve child’s health by significantly increase child’s BMI and decrease the probability of beding underweight.However,we find limited effect of prolonged leave on child’s education performance.Mechanism analysis shows that the extension of maternal leave will make the mother more involved in the early care of the child,and increase the probability of breast feeding.Using the unique data of POS consumption of Unionpay,the third part of this thesis evaluates the effect of the pilot policy of regional integration of health service on residential cross-regional medical consumption at the first time under the DID empirical strategy.We find that The pilot policy has a significant redistribution effect on the regional spatial distribution of residents’ medical consumption,Residents in the region go to areas with high-quality medical resources for medical treatment and obtain higherquality medical services.