High-income countries are increasingly described as experiencing a growing sense of detachment. But does belonging matter?

Abstract

In their new paper, SPPA Associate Professor Mehdi Ammi, Adjunct Research Professor Antoine Dedewanou and MPPA alumni Ian Allan demonstrate that belonging matters a lot for health. In fact, they show that a stronger sense of belonging causes better health, and that the health improvement is clinically meaningful. In addition to this key finding, Ammi and colleagues’ work offers a significant methodological contribution: they extend a popular health econometrics methods, called two-stage residual inclusion, from a frequentist to a Bayesian framework. Read their paper in open access here, published in Applied Economics, a leading general economics journal.

Link to full paper here

Allan I., Ammi M., Dedewanou F.A. 2024. “The effect of belongingness on health and its mechanisms: Evidence from Canada”. Applied Economics. (Online first)