Conflicting economic policies and mental health: Evidence from the UK national living wage and benefits freeze
研究英国同时实施的国家最低生活工资和福利冻结政策对低工资工人心理健康的冲突影响，发现最低工资改善心理健康，但福利冻结削弱了这一效果。
Abstract This study evaluates the mental health effects of two simultaneously implemented but conflicting policies in the UK: the National Living Wage and the benefits freeze policy. We employed the Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) DID estimator to evaluate the heterogeneous policy effects, and we found that NLW leads to positive improvements in mental health. Also, we find the negative impact of the benefits freeze policy constricts the NLW effects. Our result is robust to the sensitivity analysis of the parallel trend assumption and the comparison group definition. Additional results support the psychosocial hypothesis that increased job satisfaction is strongly correlated with improvements in mental health. Also, we found evidence of substitution effects between work hours and leisure. Overall, our findings suggest that the effects of the NLW cannot be understood in isolation from the way the entire suite of policy instruments operates on earnings and liveable income for affected low wage workers.