Distributional effects of education on mental health

We leverage the exogenous variation in education induced by the implementation of a national compulsory schooling law (CSL) in China in 1986 to study the mean and heterogeneous effects of education on mental health. Regression discontinuity (RD) estimates suggest that on average CSL beneficiaries had better mental health and lower probability of being severely depressed. We combine the RD design with novel distributional analysis methods to demonstrate that this average effect is largely driven by improvements in the top half of the mental health distribution (higher scores indicating worse mental health). These findings not only add to the scant evidence on the effect of education on mental health in low- and middle- income contexts, but also suggest that looking beyond average effects might better inform how policies can be targeted to enhance their benefits. In terms of potential mechanisms, we find that CSL beneficiaries experienced better physical health, labor market outcomes and marital outcomes.