以往关于居住安排和老年人精神健康关系的研究大多基于横截面调查数据评估空巢对老年人各心理健康指标的平均影响，而本文则使用CHARLS在2011和2013两年的追踪调查数据在更大程度上考虑了这种影响的异质性。研究发现：首先，居住安排确实对老人的心理健康有显著影响，但这种影响一方面取决于同住子女的性别，另一方面取决于不同住子女与老人的居住距离。相比之下，与女儿同住对老人的心理健康最有利，远离所有子女居住最不利，而与儿子同住和与子女相邻居住的影响则介于二者之间。其次，同一种居住安排对不同老人的心理健康有不同的影响，与子女同住或相邻居住对无同住配偶的老人和生活不能自理的老人的心理健康有更大的保护作用。考虑到样本中有迫切照料需求且远离子女居住的老人比例并不高，我们认为，因家庭结构变迁而导致的老人心理健康问题虽然存在，但目前还处于一个相对较小的范围内。

The prior research about the relationship between living arrangement and elderly people’s mental health is usually based on cross-sectional data and is usually devoted to evaluate the average treatment effect of “empty nest” on a range of health outcomes. Employing the two-wave panel data of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011 and 2013 this study further investigates the heterogeneity of this effect and gets two findings. Firstly, living arrangement does have a significant effect on elderly people’s mental health but this effect depends both on the gender of the co-residing child and on the distance between parents and the nearest non-co-residing child. In comparison living with daughter is most beneficial to parent’s mental health while living far away from all children is most detrimental; and the other two kinds of living arrangement, namely living with son and living close to children, are situated between the two. Secondly, the same living arrangement may have different effect on different people. The positive effect of living with children or living close to children is most significant when parent is disable or has no spouse. Considering the proportion of elderly people who have imperious demand on children’s support but live far away from all children is very low in our sample we argue that the psychological problem resulted from the change of family structure is minor and only confined in a small fraction of elderly people.