Hanming Fang Wins Best Article Award from Japanese Economic Review

Penn LDI Senior Fellow Paper Focused on the Mental Health of Older Chinese

February 20, 2025

By:

Hoag Levins

Print:

Hanming Fang, PhD, a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) and a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has received the 2024 Best Article Award from the Japanese Economic Review for his paper, “The State of Mental Health among Older Chinese and the Role of Children.” The article was published as part of a special journal issue on “Demographic Change and Wellbeing in Japan and Asian Economies.”

Fang is a Professor of Economics at the Penn School of Arts and Sciences and of Health Care Management at the Wharton School. He is an internationally renowned scholar specializing in the economics of China.

His award-winning paper examines the long-term effects of China’s stringent family planning policies of the 1970s, which significantly reduced family sizes. The study found that while these policies improved the physical well-being and consumption levels of older parents, they also contributed to higher rates of depressive symptoms. A key finding is that parents with fewer children—particularly those not living with them—experience a faster decline in mental health as they age. This underscores the critical role of family support in maintaining the well-being of older Chinese individuals.

Fang, who co-authored the paper with Yi Chen, PhD, an Associate Professor at ShanghaiTech University, is a Research Associate at both the Penn Population Aging Research Center (PARC) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is also Co-Founder and Executive Board member of VoxChina.org, an independent, non-partisan, and non-profit platform covering the state of the Chinese economy and its relationship to the rest of the world.