This study evaluates the mental health effects of two simultaneously implemented but conflicting policies in the UK: the National Living Wage and the benefits freeze policy. We employed the Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) DID estimator to evaluate the heterogeneous policy effects, and we found that NLW leads to positive improvements in mental health. Also, we find the negative impact of the benefits freeze policy constricts the NLW effects. Our result is robust to the sensitivity analysis of the parallel trend assumption and the comparison group definition. Additional results support the psychosocial hypothesis that increased job satisfaction is strongly correlated with improvements in mental health. Also, we found evidence of substitution effects between work hours and leisure. Overall, our findings suggest that the effects of the NLW cannot be understood in isolation from the way the entire suite of policy instruments operates on earnings and liveable income for affected low wage workers.

中文翻译：

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经济政策与心理健康的冲突：来自英国全国生活工资和福利冻结的证据

本研究评估了英国同时实施但相互冲突的两项政策对心理健康的影响：国民生活工资和福利冻结政策。我们采用 Callaway 和 Sant'Anna (2021) DID 估计器来评估异质政策效果，我们发现 NLW 会导致心理健康的积极改善。此外，我们发现福利冻结政策的负面影响限制了 NLW 效应。我们的结果对于平行趋势假设和对照组定义的敏感性分析是稳健的。其他结果支持了心理社会假设，即工作满意度的提高与心理健康的改善密切相关。此外，我们还发现了工作时间和休闲时间之间替代效应的证据。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，不能脱离整套政策工具对受影响的低工资工人的收入和宜居收入的运作方式来理解新失业救济的影响。