Research

2024

1. School Milestones Impact Child Mental Health in Taiwan

   Kuan-Ming Chen, Janet Currie, Hui Ding, and 1 more author

   2024

   Revise and Resubmit at The Economic Journal, Available at: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32842

   Abs

   This study uses administrative health insurance records in Taiwan to examine changes in child mental health treatment around four school milestones including: Primary and middle school entry, high stakes testing for high school, and high stakes testing for college entry. Leveraging age cutoffs for school entry in Taiwan, we compare August-born children to children born in September of the same year. The former hit all the milestones one year earlier than the latter, enabling us to identify each milestone’s effect. We find that entry into both primary school and middle schools is associated with increases in mental health prescribing, not only for ADHD but also for depression. Middle school entry is also associated with increases in the prescribing of anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medications. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no run-up in the use of psychiatric medications prior to high-stakes tests. But the use of psychiatric medications falls sharply following the tests. These effects are stronger in counties where both parents and children have higher educational aspirations. Hence, the use of psychiatric drugs increases at junctures when educational stresses increase and falls when these stresses are relieved.

2. Impacts of Childhood Disability on Family: Labor, Marriage, Fertility, and Depression

   Ming-Jen Lin, Kuan-Ming Chen, and Wei-Lun Lo

   2024

   Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Public Economics

   Abs DOI

   Childhood disability significantly impacts family members. Limited by data, prior research has faced challenges in measurement and identification and focused primarily on maternal labor outcomes. Utilizing 20-year-long administrative records from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database, we study cerebral palsy (CP), one of the most prevalent causes of childhood disability. We leverage its unexpected nature to investigate a broad spectrum of impacts on family members. Adopting an event study approach, we examine various outcomes, including parental labor supply, mental health, marital status, and fertility. Our findings reveal that having a child with CP decreases the mother’s likelihood of employment by 6.2 percentage points (pp), increases the likelihood of divorce by 2.3 pp, and amplifies the risk of depression by 28%. Additionally, there’s a notable decrease in long-term fertility. These effects are more pronounced for parents in poorer socioeconomic conditions and for families with daughters who have CP.