The impact of education on mental health: evidence from compulsory education law in China

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the causal effect of education on mental health by using the exogenous variation in years of schooling arising from the compulsory schooling law implemented in China during the 1980s and 1990s. Using data from China Family Panel Studies, the paper finds evidence for significant protective effects of educational attainment on mental health. The results show that one extra year of schooling improves the mental health scale by 0.14 standard deviations. Furthermore, the mechanism analysis shows that education positively affects self-assessed income and social status and improves individuals’ cognitive ability.

KEYWORDS:

• Compulsory education law
• education
• mental health
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I12
• I21
• I28

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ It is estimated that mental illnesses are responsible for 13% of the global disease burden in 2010, which is roughly 50% of the entire global health spending for that year (Collins et al. 2011). Mental health problems also lead to significant costs in China. A study by Xu et al. (2016) suggested that depression cost the nation an estimated $88.8 billion in 2013, which corresponds to 1.1% of China’s GDP.

² Due to data limitations, I cannot explore all of the potential mechanisms.

³ The CFPS 2010 measures respondent’s cognitive ability by using verbal and maths tests. The verbal test consists of 34 Chinese characteristics and the maths test contains 24 mathematical questions. All the questions are sorted in order of increasing difficulty. The CFPS assigned respondents to three groups according to their highest level of education. The less-educated group starts with easier verbal/maths questions. The final test score would be the rank order of the last character/problem that a respondent correctly recognized or solved.