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.

Highlights

  • The quantity-quality model of Becker and Lewis (1973) suggests that decreases in the quantity of children will induce more resources to be allocated to each child so that the average child quality will increase

  • This paper relates the rising prevalence of myopia and the growing number of only-children induced by One-Child Policy, providing new insights into an important health consequence of One-Child Policy in China

  • We find that only-children, as the only hope in a household, receive higher expectations from parents in terms of academic performance and future educational attainment, which contribute to the increased myopia

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The quantity-quality model of Becker and Lewis (1973) suggests that decreases in the quantity of children will induce more resources to be allocated to each child so that the average child quality will increase. This paper relates the rising prevalence of myopia and the growing number of only-children induced by One-Child Policy, providing new insights into an important health consequence of One-Child Policy in China. We examine whether the One-Child Policy initiated in 1980 in China is responsible for the increasing educational pressures and the rising prevalence of myopia in China. The prevalence of myopia has markedly increased within the past two decades in China This is the first study which relates the rising prevalence of myopia and the growing number of only-children induced by One-Child Policy. This paper exploits the quasi-natural experiment generated by the One-Child Policy in China to identify the causal effect of being an only-child on the odds of having myopia.

EMPIRICAL SPECIFICATION
Definition of myopia
Myopia in China
Summary statistics
Baseline Results
The Degree of Myopia
Heterogeneous Effects
Channels
CONCLUSION
Full Text
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