SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

Facing a rapidly aging population, China recognizes that the mental and physical health of the elderly is an increasingly important public health concern. In this paper, I evaluate the impact of pension enrollment upon the incidence of depression and anxiety and upon retirees’ ability to perform activities for daily living (ADL). Employing survey data from the 2018 wave of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, I estimate the causal effects of pension enrollment by matching pensioners to observationally similar non-pensioners using propensity score matching. I find that pension enrollment significantly reduces the incidence of depression among rural residents, with substantively similar yet imprecisely estimated effects for urban residents. I also find that pension enrollment significantly increases ADL overall, and that this effect is driven by rural residents. Finally, I detect no effect of pension enrollment upon the incidence of anxiety overall or among rural or urban subgroups. These findings lend further empirical support to the hypothesis that pension enrollment reduces the incidence of depression among Chinese retirees, bolstering previous work which adopted an instrumental variables approach.