Is there a health penalty of China's rapid urbanization?
利用中国健康与营养调查的纵向数据，构建城市性指数并采用双重差分法，发现城市化显著增加了自评健康不良的概率，且城市化程度越高影响越大，部分原因在于健康行为改变如脂肪摄入和吸烟增加。
While highly pertinent to the human welfare consequences of development, the impact of rapid urbanization on population health is not obvious. This paper uses community and individual-level longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey to estimate the net health impact of China's unprecedented urbanization. We construct an index of urbanicity from a broad set of community characteristics and define urbanization in terms of movements across the distribution of this index. We use difference-in-differences estimators to identify the treatment effect of urbanization on the self-assessed health of individuals. We find that urbanization raises the probability of reporting of poor health and that a greater degree of urbanization has a larger effect. The effect may, in part, be attributable to changed health expectations, but it also appears to operate through health behaviour. Populations experiencing urbanization tend to consume more fat and smoke more.