Parental migration and self-reported health status of adolescents in China: a cross-sectional study

Background: Over 100 million children are parented by migrant workers in China. The aim of this study was to investigate how self-reported adolescent physical and mental health are associated with parental migration. Methods: Based on cross-sectional data of 13996 students in 112 schools drawn from a nationally representative sample of middle school students in China, this study used self-reported measures for adolescent physical and mental health. Ordered logistic regression was used for the analysis of self-reported physical health, and linear regression was used for the analysis of self-reported mental health, both adjusting for socio-economic covariates and school fixed effects, to determine how adolescent health is associated with parental migration. Findings: In urban areas, migrant adolescents were physically healthier (OR=1.19, 95% CI: 1.03–1.36), and similarly mentally healthy (b=-0.07, 95% CI: -0.37–0.23), compared to urban adolescents from intact families; in rural areas, left-behind adolescents were less physically (OR=0.84, 95% CI: 0.76–0.94) and mentally (b=0.45, 95% CI: 0.24–0.66) healthy than rural-intact adolescents, holding other variables constant. Left-behind adolescents had less close parent-adolescent relationships than rural-intact adolescents with both father (OR=0.63, 95% CI: 0.56–0.71) and mother (OR=0.62, 95% CI: 0.54–0.70). Interpretation: Our study highlights a great need for health interventions aimed at left-behind adolescents in China and globally, and the important roles of parent-adolescent relationships in addressing the health needs of left-behind adolescents

The Impact of Online Logistics Service Quality Review Information on Consumers\u27 Purchase Intention

This paper constructs the index dimension of online logistics service quality review information from the two aspects of e-commerce logistics service quality factors and online review information characteristic factors, builds a structural equation model of online logistics service quality reviews information on consumers\u27 purchase intention. Empirical method is used to verify and analyze the model and hypothesis. The results show that six variables of e-commerce logistics service quality, including timeliness, reliability, empathy and online review information, such as value, quality and amount, acting on consumers\u27 purchase intention, timeliness indirectly affects consumers\u27 purchase intention through the value and amount of online review information, while empathy indirectly affects consumers\u27 purchase intention through the value of online review information. On this basis, the analysis results are discussed, and relevant suggestions are put forward for logistics enterprises and online shop sellers to create a good environment for consumers online shopping

Empirical Essays on the Economics of Education.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays on the economics of education. Chapter 2 explores a secondary school admission policy reform and employs repeat sales data to examine the relationship between house prices and school quality. I use the reform to generate exogenous variation in school quality, and repeat sales data to eliminate time-invariant unobservable influences on house prices. There are two primary findings from this analysis. First, I find that a one standard deviation increase in school performance raises house prices by 2-2. 5% for non-flat properties. Conversely, flats do not respond to school quality. Second, I show that parents value school outputs more than they do school inputs. These findings are robust to a number of alternative school quality measures and samples. Chapter 3 provides evidence on the effectiveness of school capital investment on education outcomes by studying the short-run effect of a large school construction programme in England. Taking advantage of the phasing design that the whole programme is delivered in a sequence of waves, I apply difference-in-differences techniques to elicit the causal effect of school capital investment on student academic achievement. I find that the programme disproportionately affects pupils from different backgrounds: academically and socioeconomically disadvantaged students enjoy large and positive test score gains, while their more advantaged counterparts do not. The overall effect remains positive but much smaller and insignificant. There is some evidence suggesting heterogeneous effects by school types, project types, and time lengths of building occupancy. I further demonstrate that these results are not driven by student selection into newly built schools. Chapter 4 examines how income under-reporting could lead to biases in estimating returns to education for the self-employed. As the first step, I infer the true self-employment income following an expenditure-based approach. An average self-employed worker's reported earnings should be boosted by a factor of 1. 4 to arrive at the actual earnings. More importantly, the degree of income under-reporting is nonlinear across the income distribution. Lower-income self-employed households under-report more heavily. In the second step, I estimate the returns to education for self-employed workers using the inferred income data. I find income under-reporting leads to a severe upward bias in estimating the returns to education. Compared to employees, the self-employed extract lower returns from education

MPMQA: Multimodal Question Answering on Product Manuals

Visual contents, such as illustrations and images, play a big role in product manual understanding. Existing Product Manual Question Answering (PMQA) datasets tend to ignore visual contents and only retain textual parts. In this work, to emphasize the importance of multimodal contents, we propose a Multimodal Product Manual Question Answering (MPMQA) task. For each question, MPMQA requires the model not only to process multimodal contents but also to provide multimodal answers. To support MPMQA, a large-scale dataset PM209 is constructed with human annotations, which contains 209 product manuals from 27 well-known consumer electronic brands. Human annotations include 6 types of semantic regions for manual contents and 22,021 pairs of question and answer. Especially, each answer consists of a textual sentence and related visual regions from manuals. Taking into account the length of product manuals and the fact that a question is always related to a small number of pages, MPMQA can be naturally split into two subtasks: retrieving most related pages and then generating multimodal answers. We further propose a unified model that can perform these two subtasks all together and achieve comparable performance with multiple task-specific models. The PM209 dataset is available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/MPMQA

Explore and Tell: Embodied Visual Captioning in 3D Environments

While current visual captioning models have achieved impressive performance, they often assume that the image is well-captured and provides a complete view of the scene. In real-world scenarios, however, a single image may not offer a good viewpoint, hindering fine-grained scene understanding. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel task called Embodied Captioning, which equips visual captioning models with navigation capabilities, enabling them to actively explore the scene and reduce visual ambiguity from suboptimal viewpoints. Specifically, starting at a random viewpoint, an agent must navigate the environment to gather information from different viewpoints and generate a comprehensive paragraph describing all objects in the scene. To support this task, we build the ET-Cap dataset with Kubric simulator, consisting of 10K 3D scenes with cluttered objects and three annotated paragraphs per scene. We propose a Cascade Embodied Captioning model (CaBOT), which comprises of a navigator and a captioner, to tackle this task. The navigator predicts which actions to take in the environment, while the captioner generates a paragraph description based on the whole navigation trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms other carefully designed baselines. Our dataset, codes and models are available at https://aim3-ruc.github.io/ExploreAndTell.Comment: 12 pages; 10 figures; ICCV 202

Movie101: A New Movie Understanding Benchmark

To help the visually impaired enjoy movies, automatic movie narrating systems are expected to narrate accurate, coherent, and role-aware plots when there are no speaking lines of actors. Existing works benchmark this challenge as a normal video captioning task via some simplifications, such as removing role names and evaluating narrations with ngram-based metrics, which makes it difficult for automatic systems to meet the needs of real application scenarios. To narrow this gap, we construct a large-scale Chinese movie benchmark, named Movie101. Closer to real scenarios, the Movie Clip Narrating (MCN) task in our benchmark asks models to generate role-aware narration paragraphs for complete movie clips where no actors are speaking. External knowledge, such as role information and movie genres, is also provided for better movie understanding. Besides, we propose a new metric called Movie Narration Score (MNScore) for movie narrating evaluation, which achieves the best correlation with human evaluation. Our benchmark also supports the Temporal Narration Grounding (TNG) task to investigate clip localization given text descriptions. For both two tasks, our proposed methods well leverage external knowledge and outperform carefully designed baselines. The dataset and codes are released at https://github.com/yuezih/Movie101.Comment: Accepted to ACL 202

Trends in psychological distress in Great Britain, 1991-2019: evidence from three representative surveys

BACKGROUND: Previously improving UK mortality trends stalled around 2012, with evidence implicating economic policy as the cause. This paper examines whether trends in psychological distress across three population surveys show similar trends. METHODS: We report the percentages reporting psychological distress (4+ in the 12-item General Health Questionnaire) from Understanding Society (Great Britain, 1991–2019), Scottish Health Survey (SHeS, 1995–2019) and Health Survey for England (HSE, 2003–2018) for the population overall, and stratified by sex, age and area deprivation. Summary inequality indices were calculated and segmented regressions fitted to identify breakpoints after 2010. RESULTS: Psychological distress was higher in Understanding Society than in SHeS or HSE. There was slight improvement between 1992 and 2015 in Understanding Society (with prevalence declining from 20.6% to 18.6%) with some fluctuations. After 2015 there is some evidence of a worsening in psychological distress across surveys. Prevalence worsened notably among those aged 16–34 years after 2010 (all three surveys), and aged 35–64 years in Understanding Society and SHeS after 2015. In contrast, the prevalence declined in those aged 65+ years in Understanding Society after around 2008, with less clear trends in the other surveys. The prevalence was around twice as high in the most deprived compared with the least deprived areas, and higher in women, with trends by deprivation and sex similar to the populations overall. CONCLUSION: Psychological distress worsened among working-age adults after around 2015 across British population surveys, mirroring the mortality trends. This indicates a widespread mental health crisis that predates the COVID-19 pandemic

Trends in psychological distress in Great Britain, 1991-2019: evidence from three representative surveys

BACKGROUND: Previously improving UK mortality trends stalled around 2012 due to economic policy changes. This paper examines whether trends in psychological distress across three population surveys show similar trends. METHODS: We report the percentages reporting psychological distress (4+ in the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12)) from Understanding Society (Great Britain, 1991-2019), Scottish Health Survey (SHeS, 1995-2019) and Health Survey for England (HSE, 2003-2018) for the population overall, and stratified by sex, age and area deprivation. Summary inequality indices were calculated and segmented regressions fitted to identify turning points after 2010. RESULTS: Psychological distress was higher in Understanding Society than in the SHeS or HSE. There was a slight improvement between 1992 and 2015 in Understanding Society (with prevalence declining from 20.6% to 18.6%) with some fluctuations. After 2015 there is some evidence of an overall deterioration in psychological distress across surveys. Prevalence worsened notably among those aged 16-34 years after 2010 (all three surveys), and aged 35-64 years in Understanding Society and SHeS after 2015. In contrast, the prevalence declined in those aged 65+ years in Understanding Society after around 2008, with less clear trends in the other surveys. The prevalence was around twice as high in the most deprived compared to the least deprived areas, and higher in women, with trends by deprivation and sex similar to the populations overall. CONCLUSION: Psychological distress worsened amongst working-age adults after around 2015 across British population surveys, mirroring the mortality trends. This indicates a widespread health crisis that pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic

Does health insurance reduce out-of-pocket expenditure? Heterogeneity among China's middle-aged and elderly

China's recent healthcare reforms aim to provide fair and affordable health services for its huge population. In this paper, we investigate the association between China's health insurance and out-of-pocket (OOP) healthcare expenditure. We further explore the heterogeneity in this association. Using data of 32,387 middle-aged and elderly individuals drawn from the 2011 and 2013 waves of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we report five findings. First, having health insurance increases the likelihood of utilizing healthcare and reduces inpatient OOP expenditure. Second, healthcare benefits are distributed unevenly: while low- and medium-income individuals are the main beneficiaries with reduced OOP expenditure, those faced with very high medical bills are still at risk, owing to limited and shallow coverage in certain aspects. Third, rural migrants hardly benefit from having health insurance, suggesting that institutional barriers are still in place. Fourth, health insurance does not increase patient visits to primary care facilities; hospitals are still the main provider of healthcare. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that patients shift from higher-tier to lower-tier hospitals. Last, OOP spending on pharmaceuticals is reduced for inpatient care but not for outpatient care, suggesting that people rely on inpatient care to obtain reimbursable drugs, putting further pressure on the already overcrowded hospitals. Our findings suggest that China's health insurance system has been effective in boosting healthcare utilization and lowering OOP hospitalization expenditure, but there still remain challenges due to the less generous rural scheme, shallow outpatient care coverage, lack of insurance portability, and an underdeveloped primary healthcare system

Patient choice of health care providers in China: primary care facilities versus hospitals

As China’s health system is faced with challenges of overcrowded hospitals, there is a great need to better understand the recent patterns and determinants of people’s choice between primary care facilities and hospitals for outpatient care. Based on recent individual-level data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) and official province-level data from China health statistical yearbooks, we examine the patterns of outpatient visits to primary care facilities versus hospitals among middle-aged and older individuals and explore both supply- and demand-side correlates that explain these patterns. We find that 53% of outpatient visits were paid to primary care facilities as opposed to hospitals in 2015, compared to 60% in 2011. Both supply and demand factors were associated with this decline. On the supply side, we find that the density of primary care facilities did not account for this decline, but higher densities of hospitals and licensed doctors were associated with lower use of primary care facilities. On the demand side, we find that individuals with higher socioeconomic status and greater health care needs were less likely to use primary health care facilities. Our findings suggest that a high concentration of health care professionals in hospitals diverts patients away from primary care facilities. Staffing the primary care facilities with a well-trained health care workforce is the key to a well-functioning primary care system. The findings also suggest a need to address demand-side inequality issues