Location:  New Main Building 1620

Time:        2018/10/26 Friday 15:00-17:00

Speaker:   Klaus F. Zimmermann，President of the Global Labor Organization (GLO), UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University

Presenter: Professor Shi Li, Business School, Beijing Normal University

Abstract:  This paper investigates the effect of drinking arsenic contaminated water on mental health. Drinking water with an unsafe arsenic level for a prolonged period can lead to arsenicosis and associated illness. Based on rich and newly collected household survey data from Bangladesh, we construct several measures for arsenic contamination that include the actual arsenic level in the respondent’s tubewell (TW), and past institutional arsenic test results as well as their physical and mental health. In contrast to the existing literature, we provide objective measures of arsenic exposure and take advantage of the quasi-randomness of arsenic distribution to account for the potential endogeneity of developing arsenicosis related to possible selection of certain households into using safe or unsafe sources of water. We take the pre-1999 use of TW as an instrument and recursive structural modelling (using the SUR approach) as alternatives for robustness checks. We find that suffering from an arsenicosis symptom is strongly negatively related to mental health.

Brief introduction: Klaus F. Zimmermann is the President of the Global Labor Organization (GLO), UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University. He is also the Co-Director of POP at UNU-MERIT; Full Professor of Economics at Bonn University (em.); Honorary Professor, Maastricht University, Free University of Berlin and Renmin University of China, Beijing and among other current positions. He was the Founding Director, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); Past-President, German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). He has published 53 books, 168 papers in refereed research journals, 152 chapters in collected volumes and other academic works. He is committed to the diffusion of research to policy and society, writes regularly in leading international media and advises governments, the European Commission and the World Bank on labor market and migration issues. Since the outstanding research work, he has been rewarded Distinguished John G. Diefenbaker Award 1998 of the Canada Council for the Arts; Outstanding Contribution Award 2013 of the European Investment Bank. Rockefeller Foundation Policy Fellow 2017; Eminent Research Scholar Award 2017, Australia; EBES Fellow Award 2018 of the Eurasia Business and Economics Society.