Dawei Feng

Background: Improving the individual’s mental health is important for sustainable economic and social development. Although some studies found that household wealth gap may affect individuals’ mental health, few studies have clarified the causal relationship between household wealth gap between mental health in China. This study examines the impact of the household wealth gap on individuals’ mental health using data from the 2012–2018 China Family Panel Survey.Methods: This study first used the two-way fixed effects model to investigate the impact of household wealth gap on individuals’ mental health. Considering the endogeneity, the two-stage least square and propensity score matching were employed to examine the impact of household wealth inequality on individuals’ mental health.Results: The results show that the household wealth gap has negative impact on individuals’ mental health. A series of robustness tests support this conclusion. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the impact of household wealth gap on mental health is more pronounced among middle-aged and elderly individuals, residents with lower education levels, and rural residents. The results of the mechanism analysis suggest that the household wealth gap may affect individuals’ mental health by influencing the individual’s health insurance investment and neighborhood relations. In addition, the household wealth gap not only significantly negatively affects individuals’ mental health in the short term but also in the medium- to long-term.Conclusion: These findings suggest that the government should take various measures to narrow the wealth inequality between families, which may effectively improve the mental health of residents.

Background Improving the individual’s mental health is important for sustainable economic and social development. Although some studies found that household wealth gap may affect individuals’ mental health, few studies have clarified the causal relationship between household wealth gap between mental health in China. This study examines the impact of the household wealth gap on individuals' mental health using data from the 2012–2018 China Family Panel Survey.Methods This study first used the two-way fixed effects model to investigate the impact of household wealth gap on individuals’ mental health. Considering the endogeneity, the two-stage least square and propensity score matching were employed to examine the impact of household wealth inequality on individuals' mental health.Results The results show that the household wealth gap has negative impact on individuals’ mental health. A series of robustness tests support this conclusion. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the household wealth gap has a greater impact on the mental health of an individual with lower education levels and in rural areas. The results of the mechanism analysis suggest that the household wealth gap may affect individuals' mental health by influencing the individual’s health insurance commitment and neighborhood relations. In addition, the household wealth gap not only significantly negatively affects individuals' mental health in the short term but also in the medium- to long-term.Conclusion These findings suggest that the government should take various measures to narrow the wealth inequality between families, which may effectively improve the mental health of residents.

Based on the data from the 2012–2018 China Family Panel Survey, this study examines the impact of household wealth on individuals’ mental health using a two-way fixed effects model. The findings indicate that household wealth exerts a significant positive effect on individuals’ mental health. Furthermore, this study shows that the impact of household wealth on individuals’ mental health is nonlinear but inverted U-shaped. Considering the possible endogeneity problem, this study further examines the effect of household wealth on residents’ mental health using two-stage least squares, and the conclusions remain robust. The results of the heterogeneity analysis indicate that household wealth has a greater impact on the mental health of residents in the low-education group and western region. Furthermore, the results of the mechanisms reveal that household wealth affects mental health by influencing insurance investment and individuals’ labor supply. Moreover, this study finds that household wealth affects individuals’ mental health not only in the short term but also in the medium and long terms. This study provides policy implications for the government toward improving individuals’ mental health.

Since the reform and opening up, China’s urbanization level has rapidly increased. However, urban civilization construction lags behind, creating a series of problems, such as environmental pollution, further restricting the healthy and sustainable development of cities. Therefore, China has carried out top-down civilized city construction led by the government. This paper regards the “national civilized city” selection implemented by the Chinese government as a quasi-natural experiment and empirically tests the impact of government-led civilized city construction on urban green innovation and the mechanism of this impact by using the progressive difference-in-differences (DID) model based on panel data of 281 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2018. The results show that civilized city construction contributes to increasing the level of urban green innovation, which is supported by a series of robustness tests conducted through variable substitution and sample adjustment. The quantile regression results show that the higher the level of green innovation, the stronger the green innovation effect of civilized city construction. This finding indicates that the marginal effect of green innovation in civilized city construction is gradually enhanced with the gradual increase in the level of green innovation in cities. The mediating effect analysis shows that civilized city construction can provide financial support for green innovation activities by promoting the expansion of the urban investment scale, which, in turn, increases the level of urban green innovation. In addition, environmental regulation can strengthen the promoting effect of civilized city construction on green innovation. These findings hold important theoretical and practical significance for understanding the green innovation effect of government-led civilized city construction and further leveraging the important role of government in the construction of the urban business environment as a means to promote urban investment clustering, lay the factor foundation for green innovation and strengthen the synergy between environmental regulation policies and civilized city construction policies.