任彦军教授作为通讯作者在Economic Development and Cultural Change (EDCC) 期刊上发表合作成果“Richer and Healthier? Social Pensions and Unhealthy Consumption Behaviour in China”.

简介：考虑到生命周期的效用，社会养老金对不健康消费行为的非预期影响尚未得到深入的研究。本研究基于生命周期效用模型，该模型整合了消费者的健康与不健康、短期与长期消费行为，旨在社会考察养老金对农村老年人吸烟行为及其背后机制的影响。以中国的新农村养老金计划（NRPS）为政策实验背景，利用2011年、2013年、2015年和2018年的中国健康与养老追踪调查数据，本研究采用非参数模糊回归断点设计来处理领取养老金的内生性问题。研究结果显示，领取养老金后吸烟概率和吸烟量均有所下降。导致这一结果的主要原因是养老金带来的收入增长使消费者更加重视未来的效用。虽然消费者也可能用健康食物替代吸烟，但这并不是主要的影响渠道。此外，社会养老金对健康的积极影响在相对较贫穷或预期寿命较长的老年人中更为显著。

本研究主要做出了四方面贡献：首先，通过将理论和实证相结合，确立了养老金领取与香烟消费之间的因果关系，为收入变动对健康影响的研究提供了新的视角。其次，深入分析了收入冲击对不健康消费行为的异质性影响，尤其是养老金对于预算受限的低收入人群所带来的影响。第三，对长期存在的关于预期寿命如何影响消费行为的争论进行了探讨，并明确了在收入变动情境下预期寿命与不健康消费之间的关系。最后，从多个维度分析了农村养老金如何影响不健康消费的潜在机制。

综上，通过对中国农村养老金的深入研究，我们发现鼓励农村低收入人群参与养老金计划可以有效地减少吸烟并提高他们的健康水平。此经验对亚洲和非洲的其他发展中国家具有参考价值：通过实施类似的养老金政策，尤其是针对低收入人群的特定政策，不仅可以提升其经济收益，也能促进公共健康，实现健康和经济的双赢。

Abstract: The unintended impact of social pensions on unhealthy consumption behaviours with consideration of life course utility has not been well studied. Based on a life course utility model that incorporate healthy and unhealthy, short run and long run consumption behavior of consumers, this study examines the impact of social pensions on smoking behaviours of the rural elderly and its underlying channels. Using China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) as a policy experiment, our empirical identification rests on nonparametric fuzzy regression discontinuity to address the endogeneity problem of receiving a pension. The data used in this study are from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, covering the four waves of 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2018. Overall, the results indicate that receiving a pension decreases the probability of smoking and the number of cigarettes smoked. We show that the most important channel is the increase in income following the pension transfer that make consumers value more the future utility, instead of substituting smoking by food, which is healthier. The positive health impact of social pension is more salient for elderly individuals who are relatively poor or who have a longer life expectancy.

文章信息：Xiaobing Wang, Xinyuan Lei, Yanjun Ren*, and Jianyu Yu*. Richer and Healthier? Social Pensions and Unhealthy Consumption Behaviour in China. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1086/727535.

编辑：黄禄臣 审核：任彦军