Do only children have poor vision? Evidence from China's One-Child Policy

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Zhao, Liqiu and Zhou, Minghai (2018) Do only children have poor vision? Evidence from China's One-Child Policy. Health Economics . ISSN 1099-1050

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Abstract

This paper examines whether only children have poor vision by exploiting the quasinatural experiment generated by the Chinese One‐Child Policy. The results suggest that being an only child increases the incidence of myopia by 9.1 percentage points. We further investigate the mechanisms through which being an only child affects the myopia and find that only children, as the only hope in a household, receive higher expectations in terms of academic performance and future educational attainment and pressure to succeed in life from parents, which contribute to the increased myopia. We also find that the school quality of only children is significantly higher than that of non‐only children. This study provides new insights into an important health consequence of One‐Child Policy in China.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Zhao, L., & Zhou, M. (2018). Do only children have poor vision? Evidence from China's One‐Child Policy. Health economics., which has been published in final form at 10.1002/hec.3661. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
Keywords: China; educational pressure; myopia; One-Child Policy
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham Ningbo China > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Economics
Identification Number: 10.1002/hec.3661
Depositing User: Zhou, Elsie
Date Deposited: 09 May 2018 08:17
Last Modified: 23 Apr 2019 04:30
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/51604

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