Can Education Motivate Individual Health Demands? Dynamic Pseudo-panel Evidence from China's Immigration

TL;DR

This study uses a dynamic pseudo-panel approach to show that education positively influences health record completion and health decision-making willingness among China's mobile population, with effects varying by gender, age, and education level.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic pseudo-panel method to analyze education's impact on health demands, accounting for cohort effects and dynamic biases in China's context.

Findings

Education increases health record completion rates.

Previous years' completion positively influences current rates.

Heterogeneous effects of education on health decisions by gender, age, and education level.

Abstract

Enhancing residents' willingness to participate in basic health services is a key initiative to optimize the allocation of health care resources and promote equitable improvements in group health. This paper investigates the effect of education on resident health record completion rates using a system GMM model based on pseudo-panel that consisting of five-year cross-sectional data. To mitigate possible endogeneity, this paper controls for cohort effects while also attenuating dynamic bias in the estimation from a dynamic perspective and provides robust estimates based on multi-model regression. The results show that (1) education can give positive returns on health needs to the mobile population under the static perspective, and such returns are underestimated when cohort effects are ignored; (2) there is a significant cumulative effect of file completion rate under the dynamic perspective, and file completion in previous years will have a positive effect on the current year. (3)The positive relationship between education and willingness to make health decisions is also characterized by heterogeneity by gender, generation, and education level itself. Among them, education is more likely to promote decision-making intentions among men and younger groups, and this motivational effect is more significant among those who received basic education.