The Effect of Welfare State Policy Spending on the Equalization of Socioeconomic Status Disparities in Mental Health.

This article examines whether and how the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and depression is modified by welfare state spending using the 2006, 2012, and 2014 survey rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) merged with macroeconomic data from the World Bank, Eurostat, and SOCX database (N = 87,466). Welfare state spending effort divided between social investment and social protection spending modifies the classic inverse relationship between SES and depression. Distinguishing policy areas in both social investment and social protection spending demonstrates that policy programs devoted to education, early childhood education and care, active labor market policies, old age care, and incapacity account for differences in the effect of SES across countries. Our analysis finds that social investment policies better explain cross-national differences in the effect of SES on depression, implying policies focused earlier in the life course matter more for understanding social disparities in the mental health of populations.

Neighborhoods, Schools, and Academic Achievement: A Formal Mediation Analysis of Contextual Effects on Reading and Mathematics Abilities.

Although evidence indicates that neighborhoods affect educational outcomes, relatively little research has explored the mechanisms thought to mediate these effects. This study investigates whether school poverty mediates the effect of neighborhood context on academic achievement. Specifically, it uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, counterfactual methods, and a value-added modeling strategy to estimate the total, natural direct, and natural indirect effects of exposure to an advantaged rather than disadvantaged neighborhood on reading and mathematics abilities during childhood and adolescence. Contrary to expectations, results indicate that school poverty is not a significant mediator of neighborhood effects during either developmental period. Although moving from a disadvantaged neighborhood to an advantaged neighborhood is estimated to substantially reduce subsequent exposure to school poverty and improve academic achievement, school poverty does not play an important mediating role because even the large differences in school composition linked to differences in neighborhood context appear to have no appreciable effect on achievement. An extensive battery of sensitivity analyses indicates that these results are highly robust to unobserved confounding, alternative model specifications, alternative measures of school context, and measurement error, which suggests that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are largely due to mediating factors unrelated to school poverty.

Race, Language, or Length of Residency? Explaining Unequal Uptake of Government Pensions in Canada.

Canada's old age security (OAS), a flat-benefit public pension, is internationally lauded as an accessible and effective safety net for seniors. This paper explores discrepancies in OAS uptake using Canadian Census data from 1996 to 2011. Our findings demonstrate disparities in OAS uptake based on immigration status, language proficiency, and visible minority status, disputing claims of "universal" OAS provision. Multivariate analyses confirm a strong "immigrant effect," with being in Canada for 20 years or less leading to lower rates of OAS utilization. They also confirm that those not proficient in Canada's official languages are less likely to receive OAS benefits. However, the influence of racialized minority status is found to be spurious; after controlling for immigration status and official language proficiency, many racialized minority senior groups have higher odds of receiving OAS than White Canadians. We conclude with a brief discussion of the tradeoffs involved in considering a potential removal of OAS eligibility barriers for immigrants in Canada.