Time：Dec. 8（Wedn）10:00-11:30am
Venue：Chengze Garden Rm246
Speaker 1：WANG Xiaoqian（PhD candidate, School of Economics）
Topic: The impact of COVID-19 outbreak on healthcare accessibility: Evidence from China
The onset and unprecedented scope of the COVID-19 pandemic has raised great concern about global health. The Chinese government has made a great effort to contain the pandemic and deliver medical services to infected people. However, healthcare accessibility for uninfected people may have been negatively affected. Exploiting the staggered expansion of COVID-19 and an administrative data set from a public service platform in a big city in China, this paper empirically examines the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on healthcare accessibility. The results show that the COVID-19 outbreak decreased healthcare accessibility significantly, and the negative impact has lasted for about 3 weeks. The number of requests for medical services increased by 76% during the first week of the COVID-19 outbreak and by 60% during the second week. This paper provides evidence on the cost of the COVID-19 outbreak and has policy implications for the prevention and control of COVID-19 and other similar communicable diseases.
Speaker 2：YU Shuang（PhD candidate, School of Economics）
Topic：Are non-left-behind children really not left behind? The impact of village migration on the health outcomes of non-left-behind children in rural China
Previous studies have typically found that parental migration affects the children left behind but have ignored the spillover effects of the proportion of village migration on non-left-behind children. This article examines how village migration affects non-left-behind children’s health outcomes. The results from an instrumental variable analysis show a sizable adverse effect of exposure to village migration on the health outcomes of non-left-behind children. When the effect of village migration is ignored, the relative impact of parental migration on left-behind children is overestimated by 7.5-8.5% and the net impact is underestimated by 50-60%. We examine the role of unhealthy peers, poor parental health behaviors, poor village healthcare infrastructure, and unbalanced human capital structure at the village level.
Speaker 3：YANG Hanmo（PhD candidate, National School of Development）
Topic：Does the current caregiver meet the parents’ expectations? —— Intergenerational interactions and informal care to the elderly
Much of the considerable attention has been devoted to the issue of caregiving behaviors from the perspective of the characteristics of caregivers, but few have documented the gap between the expectations on the caregivers and their realization. Using panel data from the four waves of the nationally representative China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we describe the characteristics of expected and current caregivers of people who experienced functional impairment during 2011 and 2018. Result suggests that 39.0% of the functionally impaired respondents have at least one actual caregiver who met their earlier expectations. Our findings support the exchange motivation theory in a way that when people are healthy, they expect children who have more intergenerational interactions with them in the current year to become the primary caregiver in the future. When they become functionally impaired in the following years, children who enjoyed their help with taking care of grandchildren are more likely to provide care to parents in return. Children with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to be regarded as a future caregiver but their chances of becoming an actual caregiver are not higher, providing weak evidence to the intra-family comparative advantage theory.
