자료유형 | 학위논문 |
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서명/저자사항 | Psychological Well-being and the Dynamics of Poverty. |
개인저자 | Ismail Allouche, Mohamad. |
단체저자명 | University of California, Davis. Agricultural and Resource Economics. |
발행사항 | [S.l.]: University of California, Davis., 2019. |
발행사항 | Ann Arbor: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019. |
형태사항 | 127 p. |
기본자료 저록 | Dissertations Abstracts International 81-04B. Dissertation Abstract International |
ISBN | 9781088300176 |
학위논문주기 | Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Davis, 2019. |
일반주기 |
Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 81-04, Section: B.
Advisor: Carter, Michael R. |
이용제한사항 | This item must not be sold to any third party vendors. |
요약 | The psychology of poverty has been receiving an ever increasing interest among economists---especially development economists. The main theme of this area of study is that there are psychological variables that are affected by poverty that can play a role in perpetuating and prolonging poverty. Psychological well-being is one such variable that, despite the ubiquity of psychological disorders and their strong correlations with poverty, has not received a lot of attention among economists. The bi-directional relationship between poverty and psychological well-being is the focus of this dissertation.Evidence across disciplines suggests a bi-directional causal relationship between an individual's psychological and economic well-being. An individual's level of economic well-being can play a role in determining their mental health and, at the same time, their psychological well-being likely can affect their earnings and thus their economic well-being. Together, these effects suggest a feedback loop that may trap some in poverty. However, studying and estimating these causal links is difficult due to this simultaneity. Moreover, it is not plausible to experimentally estimate the effect of experiencing a psychological disorder such as depression among representative samples.In this dissertation, I overcome the endogeneity due to simultaneity by extending dynamic panel data methods (Chapter 2) and using a Generalized Method of Moments approach that estimates the relationship between income and psychological well-being as a system of simultaneous dynamic equations (Chapter 3). Using a unique nationally representative panel dataset from South Africa with information on psychological well-being at the individual level in four different waves, I find evidence of nonlinear impacts in both directions. Further analysis shows that the effect of changes in psychological well-being on individual income is particularly strong near the clinical depression threshold where I estimate that a 1 standard deviation increase in depressive symptoms leads to 16% loss in earnings. Meanwhile, the results suggest that a 20\\% decrease in household income leads to 0.1 standard deviation decrease in psychological well-being---or a 6% increase in the likelihood of depression. I find that this effect is larger among the poor. These results indicate the possibility of a strong feedback loop among an especially vulnerable subgroup---the poor with low levels of psychological well-being. An impulse response function analysis shows that this bi-directionality can nearly double the long-term impact of shocks, while simulations show that this relationship can explain prolonged poverty spells due to low resilience to shocks.In Chapter 4, I use a conditional moments approach to measure development resilience among the South African households. I show that this measure has value in predicting future indicators of well-being such as poverty, household income per capita, food expenditure, and wealth. Furthermore, I show that measures of psychological well-being can predict these resilience measure even when controlling for income, food expenditure, and wealth of the household. Using dynamic panel data methods, I go on to measure the causal links between psychological well-being and the estimated resilience scores. I then show that this measure of resilience can capture some of the implications of the relationship estimated in Chapter 3 and finally I apply this conditional moments approach to estimate an economically meaningful measure of psychological resilience.The results throughout this dissertation show that psychological well-being plays an important role in income and poverty dynamics. This suggests that ignoring mental health when thinking about policy related to poverty may lead to sub-optimal outcomes and that psychological well-being is an important avenue for future innovation in poverty-alleviation programs. |
일반주제명 | Economics. Psychology. Public health. |
언어 | 영어 |
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