Are Populists Insecure About Themselves or About Their Country? Political Attitudes and Economic Perceptions.

We investigate whether greater economic insecurity increases distrust in government and fosters authoritarian politics. Using the 2016 American National Election Studies dataset, we build on the literature regarding "egotropic" and "sociotropic" economic concerns to distinguish between "micro" insecurity (perceived insecurity regarding the individual's own personal economic well-being), and "macro" insecurity (negative expectations concerning the macro economy). Our results suggest micro insecurity is not significantly correlated with attitudinal differences, but macro-level insecurity is associated with increased levels of political distrust, accompanied by greater authoritarianism. Greater macro-level insecurity is also associated with more negative feelings toward "out-groups" (e.g. Muslims, the LGBTQ+ community, feminists, immigrants) and was a key predictor in reduced affinity for Hillary Clinton and the rise in support for Donald Trump. Results are robust to controls for political affiliation and aggregate macroeconomic indicators, suggesting that rising levels of income inequality and weakening social safety nets increase political polarization and encourage xenophobia, racism, and homophobia.

The growth of poor children in China 1991-2000: why food subsidies may matter.

How did rapid growth in per capita income and rising income inequality during 1991-2000 in China affect the health status of Chinese children, given that the disappearance in the 1990s of subsidized food coupons simultaneously increased the importance of money income in enabling consumption of basic foods by poor families? Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data for 1991, 1993, 1997, and 2000 on 4400 households in nine provinces, we examine the height-for-age of Chinese children aged 2-13, with particular emphasis on the growth of children living in poor households. We use mean regression and quantile regression models to isolate the dynamic impact of poverty status and food coupon use on child height-for-age. Our principal findings are: (i) controlling for standard variables (e.g. parents' weight, height, and education) poverty is correlated with slower growth in height-for-age between 1997 and 2000 but not earlier; (ii) in 2000, poverty is negatively correlated with strong growth in height-for-age; and (iii) food coupon use in earlier periods correlates positively with growth in height-for-age. The general moral is the crucial social protection role that subsidized food programmes can potentially play in maintaining the health of poor children.

Can positive income anticipations reverse the mental health impacts of negative income anxieties?

Prospect theory suggests losses are more influential than equivalent sized gains in individual level decision-making. Extending this literature, we use longitudinal National Population Health Survey data (2000-01 to 2010-11) to investigate whether experienced psychological distress impacts of greater economic insecurity for working age Canadians can be fully reversed by equal sized increases in security. Economic insecurity (security) is defined as the probability of an annual income decrease (increase) of 25 percent or more. Our identification strategy employs fixed effects estimation and a set of instruments to control for unobserved heterogeneity and reverse causality. Results suggest that an initial one standard deviation increase in economic insecurity predicts a rise in psychological distress of about 0.57 standard deviations for males and 0.54 standard deviations for females. Good economic news of a similar magnitude has considerably less impact, reducing psychological distress by 0.16 and 0.35 standard deviations for males and females respectively.

The shattered "Iron Rice Bowl": Intergenerational effects of Chinese State-Owned Enterprise reform.

Reform of the Chinese State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) sector in the late 1990s triggered massive layoffs (34 million employees) and marked the end of the "Iron Rice Bowl" guarantee of employment security for the remaining 67 million workers. An expanding international literature has documented the adverse health impacts of economic insecurity on adults, but has typically neglected children. This paper uses the natural experiment of SOE reform to explore the causal relationship between increased parental economic insecurity and children's BMI Z-score. Using province-year-level layoff rates and income loss from the layoffs, we estimate a generalised difference-in-differences model with child fixed effects and year fixed effects. For a medium-build 10-year-old boy, a median treatment effect implies a gain of 1.8 kg and a 2.2-percentage-point increase in the overweight rate due to the reform. Anxiety about potential losses causes weight gain for boys whose SOE parents kept their jobs. Unconditional quantile regressions suggest that boys who are heavier are more likely to gain weight. Girls are not significantly affected. Intergenerational effects therefore increase the estimated public health costs of greater economic insecurity.

Healing and/or breaking? The mental health implications of repeated economic insecurity.

Current literature confirms the negative consequences of contemporaneous economic insecurity for mental health, but ignores possible implications of repeated insecurity. This paper asks how much a person's history of economic insecurity matters for psychological distress by contrasting the implications of two models. Consistent with the health capital literature, the Healing model suggests psychological distress is a stock variable affected by shocks from life events, with past events having less impact than more recent shocks. Alternatively, the Breaking Point model considers that high levels of distress represent a distinct shift in life state, which occurs if the accumulation of past life stresses exceeds some critical value. Using five cycles of Canadian National Population Health Survey data (2000-2009), we model the impact of past economic insecurity shocks on current psychological distress in a way that can distinguish between these hypotheses. In our sample of 1775 males and 1883 females aged 25 to 64, we find a robust healing effect for one-time economic insecurity shocks. For males, only a recent one-time occurrence of economic insecurity is predictive of higher current psychological distress (0.19 standard deviations). Moreover, working age adults tend to recover from past accumulated experiences of economic insecurity if they were recently economically secure. However, consistent with the Breaking Point hypothesis, males experiencing three or four cycles of recent insecurity are estimated to have a level of current psychological distress that is 0.26-0.29 standard deviations higher than those who were employed and job secure throughout the same time period. We also find, consistent with other literature, distinct gender differences - for working age females, all economic insecurity variables are statistically insignificant at conventional levels. Our results suggest that although Canadians are resilient to one-time insecurity shocks, males most vulnerable to repeated bouts suffer from elevated levels of psychological distress.

The effect of economic insecurity on mental health: Recent evidence from Australian panel data.

This paper estimates the impact of economic insecurity on the mental health of Australian adults. Taking microdata from the 2001-2011 HILDA panel survey, we develop a conceptually diverse set of insecurity measures and explore their relationships with the SF-36 mental health index. By using fixed effects models that control for unobservable heterogeneity we produce estimates that correct for endogeneity more thoroughly than previous works. Our results show that exposure to economic risks has small but consistently detrimental mental health effects. The main contribution of the paper however comes from the breadth of risks that are found to be harmful. Job insecurity, financial dissatisfaction, reductions and volatility in income, an inability to meet standard expenditures and a lack of access to emergency funds all adversely affect health. This suggests that the common element of economic insecurity (rather than idiosyncratic phenomena associated with any specific risk) is likely to be hazardous. Our preferred estimates indicate that a standard deviation shock to economic insecurity lowers an individual's mental health score by about 1.4 percentage points. If applied uniformly across the Australian population such a shock would increase the morbidity rate of mental disorders by about 1.7%.

Is all bullying the same?

BACKGROUND: We ask whether verbal abuse, threats of violence and physical assault among Canadian youth have the same determinants and whether these determinants are the same for boys and girls. If these are different, the catch-all term "bullying" may mis-specify analysis of what are really different types of behavior. METHODS: We analyze five cohorts of Canadian youth aged 12-15 from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). There are 11475 observations in total. Pearson's correlation coefficients and six different multivariate strategies are used. RESULTS: There are many faces to bullying, in terms of its form and relative frequencies for boys versus girls. Although some characteristics of an adolescent are strong predictors of being subject to more than one type of bullying, some other characteristics are only correlated with specific types of bullying. CONCLUSIONS: The many faces of bullying, and their correlation with different factors, imply different policy interventions may be needed to address each issue effectively.

Social capital and basic goods: the cautionary tale of drinking water in India.

This study uses micro-data from the 1998-99 Indian Time Use Survey (ITUS; covering 77,593 persons in 18,591 households in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Orissa, and Haryana) to argue that time use data provides a natural metric for measuring "social capital" building activities and for distinguishing between the relative importance of "bonding" into groups or "bridging" within communities. The study examines the correlation between inequality in landownership, caste status, measures of local social capital, and whether or not a household will have to collect water. In India, the probability that a rural household fetches water is 4.8% and 9.1% lower in communities in which the average time spent on social interaction and community-based activities at the district-level doubles, but it is 18.9% greater when the time in group-based activities doubles. Inequalities in landownership and home ownership are associated with considerably larger differences in local tap water availability.