No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The effect of education on health: Evidence from the 1997 compulsory schooling reform in Turkey
Abstract
This paper analyzes the relationship between education and health outcomes using a natural experiment in Turkey. The compulsory schooling increased from 5 to 8 years in 1997. This increase was accompanied by a massive construction of classrooms and recruitment of teachers in a differential rate across regions. As in previous studies, we confirm that the 1997 reform substantially increased education in Turkey. Using the number of new middle school class openings per 1000 children as an intensity measure for the 1997 reform, we find that, on average, one additional middle school class increases the probability of completion of 8 years or more of schooling by about 7.1 percentage points. We use this exogenous increase in the educational attainment to investigate the impact of education on body mass index, obesity, smoking behavior, and self-rated health, as well as the effect of maternal education on the infant's well-being. Using ordinary least squares, we find that there is a statistically significant favorable effect of education on health outcomes and behavior. However, this relationship becomes insignificant when we account for the endogeneity of education and health by instrumenting education with exogenous variations generated by the 1997 reform and the accompanying middle school class openings. The insignificance of the health effect may be due to lack of statistical power in our data, or to the fact that this policy affects only relatively low levels of schooling and the health effects of education need to be examined at higher levels of schooling.
... Popular methods include instrumental variables and regression discontinuity designs using natural experiments to instrument for education. Most of these studies use data from developed nations (e.g., Lleras-Muney, 2005;Davies et al., 2016) with some exceptions (e.g., Dursun et al., 2018;Baltagi et al., 2019;Chen et al., 2023). Moreover, ☆ We thank the Guest Editors of this special issue Francesco Moscone and Paolo Paruolo as well as the editor of the journal Sushanta Mallick and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. ...
... Evidence on the effect of education on smoking and body weight, which are among the leading preventable causes of serious healthrelated issues and death around the world, is mixed. Using compulsory schooling law changes as an instrument for schooling, Davies et al. (2016), Li and Powdthavee (2015), Silles (2015), Clark and Royer (2013), Kemptner et al. (2011), and Baltagi et al. (2019) find that there is no significant effect of education on smoking. In contrast, other studies like Etilé and Jones (2011) and Jürges et al. (2011) find a beneficial effect of schooling on smoking. ...
... Other studies exploiting different institutional changes as instruments for schooling also find that an increase in schooling reduces smoking (see Grimard and Parent, 2007;De Walque, 2007;Kenkel et al., 2006;Kamhöfer et al., 2019), while Bratti et al. (2022) find that higher education increases smoking. The causal evidence regarding the effect of education on body weight problems is also mixed: Brunello et al. (2013), Reinhold and Jürges (2010), Baltagi et al. (2019), and Kenkel et al. (2006) find no statistical evidence of an effect, while James (2015), Bratti et al. (2022), and Kamhöfer et al. (2019) find that schooling reduces the probability of being obese. Furthermore, Kemptner et al. (2011) find that there is a beneficial effect of education on obesity only for men, but not for women. ...
... In addition, Kemptner et al. [26], Brunello et al. [29], James [30] and Dursun et al. [31] report that schooling has a negative effect on obesity and BMI, while Silles [32] finds that additional education lowers the probability of smoking for males. In contrast, other studies provide no support for a causal effect of education on selfreported general health [20,30,31,[33][34][35], BMI and other weight-related outcomes [24,33,34], mental health [36,37] or smoking behaviour [20,24,26,30,31,33,34,38]. Recent evidence on the causal effect of education on self-reported health is provided by Fonseca et al. [39], Janke et al. [40], Albarrán et al. [41], Dilmaghani [38] and Malamud et al. [22]. Fonseca et al. find that education has a positive effect on a wide range of self-reported health measures including functional status, instrumental functional status and chronic conditions when evaluating several reforms in the US, the UK and Continental Europe. ...
... In addition, Kemptner et al. [26], Brunello et al. [29], James [30] and Dursun et al. [31] report that schooling has a negative effect on obesity and BMI, while Silles [32] finds that additional education lowers the probability of smoking for males. In contrast, other studies provide no support for a causal effect of education on selfreported general health [20,30,31,[33][34][35], BMI and other weight-related outcomes [24,33,34], mental health [36,37] or smoking behaviour [20,24,26,30,31,33,34,38]. Recent evidence on the causal effect of education on self-reported health is provided by Fonseca et al. [39], Janke et al. [40], Albarrán et al. [41], Dilmaghani [38] and Malamud et al. [22]. Fonseca et al. find that education has a positive effect on a wide range of self-reported health measures including functional status, instrumental functional status and chronic conditions when evaluating several reforms in the US, the UK and Continental Europe. ...
... In addition, Kemptner et al. [26], Brunello et al. [29], James [30] and Dursun et al. [31] report that schooling has a negative effect on obesity and BMI, while Silles [32] finds that additional education lowers the probability of smoking for males. In contrast, other studies provide no support for a causal effect of education on selfreported general health [20,30,31,[33][34][35], BMI and other weight-related outcomes [24,33,34], mental health [36,37] or smoking behaviour [20,24,26,30,31,33,34,38]. Recent evidence on the causal effect of education on self-reported health is provided by Fonseca et al. [39], Janke et al. [40], Albarrán et al. [41], Dilmaghani [38] and Malamud et al. [22]. ...
Using claims data on more than 23 million statutorily insured, we investigate the causal effect of schooling on health in the largest and most comprehensive analysis for Germany to date. In a regression discontinuity approach, we exploit changes in compulsory schooling in West Germany to estimate the reduced form effect of the reforms on health, measured by doctor diagnoses in ICD-10 format covering physical as well as mental health conditions. To mitigate the problem that empirical results depend on subjective decisions made by the researcher, we perform specification curve analyses to assess the robustness of findings across various model specifications. We find that the reforms have, at best, very small impacts on the examined doctor diagnoses. In most of the specifications we estimate insignificant effects that are close to zero and often of the “wrong” sign. Therefore, our study questions the presence of the large positive effects of education on health that are found in the previous literature.
... Hence, our results add to the growing literature on the effects of the expansion of education on fertility and reproductive health outcomes both in Turkey (Kirdar et al., 2009;Dinçer et al., 2014;Güneş, 2015Güneş, , 2016Kirdar et al., 2018;Baltagi et al., 2019) and other parts of the developing world, such as Malawi (Behrman, 2015;Keats, 2018), Peru (Weitzman, 2017), Uganda (Keats, 2018), Taiwan (Kan & Lee, 2018), and Romania (Malamud et al. (2021). The existing studies in Turkey differ from ours in terms of methodology, outcome variables, and overall conclusions. ...
... Therefore, any analysis of reproductive behavior was incomplete. Baltagi et al. (2019) is one of the most recent papers to address the health effects of the law. However, their focus is on general health behavior like smoking and obesity, unlike this paper, and use supply side factors as instruments for higher schooling. ...
We investigate the role of additional years of schooling mandated by a compulsory schooling expansion law in affecting reproductive preferences and safe reproductive health behaviors in Turkey—a middle-to-high-income country with gender inequity in education but overall high levels of safe reproductive health practices at the time of passing the law. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that the additional schooling improved several health behaviors. However, the effects on some outcomes commonly analyzed in the existing literature, such as contraceptive use or fertility, were either weak or insignificant. Overall, our findings complement the current literature on the marginal health benefits of schooling expansion and suggest that policymakers consider the institutional and cultural factors while evaluating the scope and potential non-educational benefits of such expansions.
... The process of societal transformation, on the other hand, might take years. Girls are not sent to school because of regulations, including such 8 years of obligatory education, which are broken in their face (Baltagi et al., 2019;Cin and Karlidağ-Dennis, 2021). ...
Turkey and Iraq are characterized by a multiplicity of religious, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Women's status in society is one of the most arguable topics in Turkey and Iraq. To build a secure and prosperous society, women's empowerment is one of the most important instruments. Traditionally, women are expected to be more dependent, relational, submissive, caring, and emotional in these countries. The development of women's self-cognition, the formation of their outlook on life, and the orientation of their values are influenced by the specific social-cultural aspects in which they live. This study provides insights into different sociocultural features among Turkish and Iraqi women. It describes family types, religious beliefs, social interactions, marriage, education, and employment. In addition, it also covers some of the cultural and traditional practices followed by women. The social relations, challenges and conflicts women face in these societies need to be studied. It is concluded that culture plays a vital role in such features; in addition, the sample's traditions have their influence and impact at women's discrimination, appointing, and roles.
... Their finding of no effect of the CER on male schooling contrasts with the well-established result in the literature that the reform has had a significant and positive effect on Turkish males (see Akyol & Kırdar, 2021;Aydemir & Kırdar, 2017;Aydemir et al., 2019;Baltagi et al., 2019;Dursun & Cesur, 2016;Dursun et al., 2018;Kırdar et al., 2010Kırdar et al., , 2012Kırdar et al., , 2016Kırdar et al., , 2018Torun, 2018). ...
We utilize a natural experiment, an education reform increasing compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years in Turkey, to obtain endogeneity‐robust estimates of the effect of male education on the incidence of domestic violence against women. We find that husband's education lowers the probability of physical, emotional, and economic violence. Schooling lowers also the likelihood of having an arranged marriage and makes men less inclined to engage in various socially unacceptable behaviors. We show that these findings are very robust to alternative regression specifications and restricted sample estimation. Finally, we argue that assortative mating implies that the educational outcomes of the two spouses are correlated. Our findings are robust to accounting for the husbands' and wives' education jointly. Moreover, when we separate the two effects, we show that the favorable effect of education can be attributed causally to men's education rather than to the education of their wives.
... A survey reviewing the studies that rely on the compulsory schooling policy to identify the causal effect of education on health outcomes-including smokingreveals that out of 25 countries for which the evidence is reported, all but two are developed economies. 8 Among the few LMICs, education has no causal effect on smoking in Turkey 19,20 ; while it reduces smoking prevalence in Vietnam 21 and China. 22 In this study, we aim to fill the gap in the literature by estimating the causal impact of education on smoking for a set of LMICs. ...
Introduction:
The prevalence of smoking is unequally distributed across certain groups. One significant dimension is education inequality, where higher smoking prevalence is generally observed in lower-educated groups. However, studies investigating educational inequality are mostly associative. Meanwhile, studies carrying out a causal investigation focus typically on developed countries. In this study, we consider a panel of low-and-middle-income countries to investigate the causal link between education and smoking behavior.
Methods:
We use detailed micro-level household surveys for 12 low-and-middle-income countries where the duration of compulsory schooling has been extended. By identifying the individuals subject to higher compulsory schooling and using the exogenous variation in education caused by the increase in the duration of compulsory schooling, we estimate the causal impact of education on tobacco consumption. We rely on regression analysis to estimate the effect.
Results:
Our results reveal that those subject to higher years of compulsory schooling have lower smoking-related outcomes, suggesting that higher education significantly lowers tobacco consumption in low-and-middle-income countries. The effect is primarily observed for women, where, for instance, higher compulsory schooling reduces the probability of smoking by 23% and the number of cigarettes smoked by 27%.
Conclusions:
The study's results establish the causal link between education and smoking behavior in low-and-middle-income countries. This significant impact suggests that education policy is still an important tool to help reduce tobacco consumption, especially in settings where the average level of education is not high initially. Moreover, discouraging men from smoking requires other measures to complement education policy.
Implications:
Education might help reduce tobacco consumption. However, studies -primarily for developed countries- find mixed results. This paper investigates the causal role of education on smoking in low-and-middle-income countries. Education reduces tobacco consumption, especially for women. Thus, education policy can be effective in low-education settings. Nonetheless, education policy should be accompanied by other policies to discourage men from smoking.
... As the post-2000s implementations are relatively new, reflections on educational outcomes have not been discussed yet. On the other hand, evidence shows that a longer period of mandatory schooling has a positive influence on health outcomes (Baltagi et al. 2019) and gender disparities (Kırdar et al. 2018) in the pre-2000. Habibi (2017) investigates the rising higher education capacity in Turkey and underlines the negative consequences stemming from over-education, which translates into a mismatch and unemployment in the labor market. ...
Economic inequality and poverty have been extensively analyzed in monetary terms. However, other aspects of poverty, such as education, health, environment and standards of living are important factors, essential for human well-being and capabilities. Using a host of non-monetary aspects of poverty, this paper sheds light on the geographical distribution of multidimensional poverty in Turkey. Results from survey data highlight that the regional distribution non-monetary dimensions of poverty is conspicuously different than that of relative monetary poverty in Turkey. Unlike the relative monetary poverty rate, multidimensional poverty measurement reflects the regional underdevelopment problem of Turkey. On the contrary, once monetary poverty is considered in absolute terms, multidimensional and absolute monetary poverty have a similar geographical pattern. Moreover, the decomposition analyses point out that females, old disabled and socially excluded individuals suffer the most from multidimensional poverty. Our combined results show that the isolated eastern regions realize the highest poverty and deprivation at each decomposition level.
In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling, and employ it to estimate the causal effects of mother's or father's schooling on infant birth outcomes in the years 1978-1999. Parents' schooling does cause favorable infant health outcomes. The increase in schooling associated with the reform saved almost 1 infant life in 1,000 live births. (JEL I12, I21, J12, J13, R23)
In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate exogenous variation in years of schooling both across states and over time. We find evidence for a strong and significant causal effect of years of schooling on long-term illness for men but not for women. Moreover, we provide somewhat weaker evidence of a causal effect of education on the likelihood of having weight problems for both sexes. On the other hand, we find little evidence for a causal effect of education on smoking behavior. Overall, our estimates suggest significant non-monetary returns to education with respect to health outcomes but not necessarily with respect to health-related behavior.
We examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using Vital Statistics Natality data for 1970 to 1999. We also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes: use of prenatal care, smoking, marriage, and fertility. In an effort to account for the endogeneity of educational attainment, we use data about the availability of colleges in the woman's county in her seventeenth year as an instrument for maternal education. We find that higher maternal education improves infant health, as measured by birth weight and gestational age. It also increases the probability that a new mother is married, reduces parity, increases use of prenatal care, and reduces smoking, suggesting that these may be important pathways for the ultimate effect on health. Our results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that estimates of the returns to education which focus only on increases in wages understate the total return. © 2001 the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Returns to investment in education based on human capital theory have been estimated since the late 1950s. In the 40-plus year history of estimates of returns to investment in education, there have been several reviews of the empirical results in attempts to establish patterns. Many more estimates from a wide variety of countries, including over-time evidence, and estimates based on new econometric techniques, reaffirm the importance of human capital theory. This paper reviews and presents the latest estimates and patterns as found in the literature at the turn of the century. However, because the availability of rate of return estimates has grown exponentially, we include a new section on the need for selectivity in comparing returns to investment in education and establishing related patterns.
We examine the growing number of studies of survey respondents' global self-ratings of health as predictors of mortality in longitudinal studies of representative community samples. Twenty-seven studies in U.S. and international journals show impressively consistent findings. Global self-rated health is an independent predictor of mortality in nearly all of the studies, despite the inclusion of numerous specific health status indicators and other relevant covariates known to predict mortality. We summarize and review these studies, consider various interpretations which could account for the association, and suggest several approaches to the next stage of research in this field.
We analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to explore the relationships between high school completion and the two leading preventable causes of death %u2013 smoking and obesity. We focus on three issues that have received a great deal of attention in research on the pecuniary returns to schooling. First, we investigate whether GED recipients differ from other high school graduates in their smoking and obesity behaviors. Second, we explore the extent to which the relationships between schooling and these health-related behaviors are sensitive to controlling for family background measures and cognitive ability. Third, we estimate instrumental variables (IV) models of the impact of schooling on smoking and obesity. Although our IV estimates are imprecise, both the OLS and IV results tend to suggest that the returns to high school completion include a reduction in smoking. We find little evidence that high school completion is associated with a lower probability of being overweight or obese for either men or women. The results also suggest that the health returns to GED receipt are much smaller than the returns to high school completion.
While there is no doubt that health is strongly correlated with education, whether schooling exerts a causal impact on health is not firmly established. We exploit a Dutch compulsory schooling law to estimate the causal effect of education on mortality. The reform provides a powerful instrument, significantly raising years of schooling, which, in turn, has a significant and robust negative effect on mortality. For men surviving to age 81, an extra year of schooling is estimated to reduce the probability of dying before the age of 89 by almost three percentage points relative to a baseline of 50 percent. Journal: Journal of Human Resources
This paper explores the effect of maternal education on child health and the channels in which education operates by exploiting a change in the compulsory schooling law (CSL) in Turkey. In order to account for the endogeneity of education, variation across cohorts induced by the timing of the CSL and variation across provinces by the intensity of additional classrooms constructed in the mother’s birth provinces is used as an instrumental variable. The results indicate that mother’s primary school completion improves infant health, as measured by very low birth weight, and child health, as measured by height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores, even after controlling for many potential confounding factors. This paper also demonstrates that maternal education leads to earlier preventive care initiation, reduces smoking, reduces fertility, and increases age at first birth.
We present a model in which compulsory school attendance laws, which typically require school attendance until a specified birthday, induce a relationship between years of schooling and age at school entry. Variation in school starting age created by children's dates of birth provides a natural experiment for estimating the effect of age at school entry. Because no large data set contains information on both age at school entry and educational attainment, we use an instrumental variables (IV) estimator with data derived from the 1960 and 1980 Censuses to estimate and test the age-at-entry/compulsory schooling model. In most IV applications, the two covariance matrices that form the estimator are constructed from the same sample. We use a method-of-moments framework to discuss IV estimators that combine moments from different data sets. In our application, quarter of birth dummies are the instrumental variables used to link the 1960 Census, from which age at school entry can be derived for one cohort of students, to the 1980 Census, which contains educational attainment for the same cohort of students. The results suggest that compulsory attendance laws constrain roughly 10% of students to stay in school.
We use Turkey’s 1997 Education Law that increased compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years to study the effect of education on women’s fertility and empowerment. Using an instrumental variables methodology, we find that a 10 percentage-point increase in the proportion of ever-married women with eight-years of schooling lowered pregnancies by 0.13 per woman; increased the proportion paying an antenatal-visit during the first trimester by 6 percentage points; using contraceptives by eight points and with knowledge of the ovulation cycle by five points. There is weak evidence that schooling decreased child mortality; no evidence that it changed attitudes toward gender inequality.
Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using US state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes across states during this period, such as relative school quality improvements, suggest that this assumption may fail to hold. Across a number of outcomes including wages, unemployment, and divorce, we find that statistically significant causal estimates become insignificant and, in many instances, wrong-signed when allowing year of birth effects to vary across regions.
There is a strong, positive and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. There is much less evidence on the extent to which this correlation reflects the causal effect of education on health - the parameter of interest for policy. In this paper we attempt to overcome the difficulties associated with estimating the causal effect of education on health. Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp differences in educational attainment among individuals born just months apart. Using regression discontinuity methods, we confirm that the cohorts just affected by these changes completed significantly more education than slightly older cohorts subject to the old laws. However, we find little evidence that this additional education improved health outcomes or changed health behaviors. We argue that it is hard to attribute these findings to the content of the additional education or the wider circumstances that the affected cohorts faced (e.g., universal health insurance). As such, our results suggest caution as to the likely health returns to educational interventions focused on increasing educational attainment among those at risk of dropping out of high school, a target of recent health policy efforts.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
This chapter explores the effects of education on nonmarket outcomes from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Examples of outcomes considered include general consumption patterns at a moment in time, savings and the rate of growth of consumption over time, own (adult) health and inputs into the production of own health, fertility, and child quality or well-being reflected by their health and cognitive development. They are distinguished from the labor market outcomes of education in terms of higher earnings and wage rates. The focus is on identifying causal effects of education and on mechanisms via which these effects operate. The chapter pays a good deal of attention to the effects of education on health for a variety of reasons. They are the two most important sources of human capital: knowledge capital and health capital. They interact in their levels and in the ways they affect the cost and usefulness of the other. There is a large literature addressing the nature of their complementarities. While each affects the production and usefulness of the other, there are important dynamics of their interaction, seen in the age-structure of the net and gross production of the two. This sequencing also affects their optimal amounts. In the conceptual foundation section, models in which education has productive efficiency and allocative efficiency effects are considered. These frameworks are then modified to allow for the endogenous nature of schooling decisions, so that observed schooling effects can be traced in part to omitted “third variables” such as an orientation towards the future. An additional complication is that schooling may contribute to a future orientation in models with endogenous preferences. The empirical review provides a good deal of evidence for the proposition that the education effects are causal but is less conclusive with regard to the identification of specific mechanisms.
The literature generally points to a negative relationship between female education and fertility. Citing this pattern, policymakers have advocated educating girls and young women as a means to reduce population growth and foster sustained economic and social welfare in developing countries. This paper tests whether the relationship between fertility and education is indeed causal by investigating the introduction of universal primary education in Nigeria. Exploiting differences in program exposure by region and age, the paper presents reduced form and instrumental variables estimates of the impact of female education on fertility. The analysis suggests that increasing female education by one year reduces early fertility by 0.26 births.
This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings. I focus on four areas of work: theoretical and econometric advances in modelling the causal effect of education in the presence of heterogeneous returns to schooling; recent studies that use institutional aspects of the education system to form instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling; recent studies of the earnings and schooling of twins; and recent attempts to explicitly model sources of heterogeneity in the returns to education. Consistent with earlier surveys of the literature, I conclude that the average (or average marginal) return to education is not much below the estimate that emerges from a standard human capital earnings function fit by OLS. Evidence from the latest studies of identical twins suggests a small upward “ability” bias — on the order of 10%. A consistent finding among studies using instrumental variables based on institutional changes in the education system is that the estimated returns to schooling are 20–40% above the corresponding OLS estimates. Part of the explanation for this finding may be that marginal returns to schooling for certain subgroups — particularly relatively disadvantaged groups with low education outcomes — are higher than the average marginal returns to education in the population as a whole.
The article attempts to develop a general theory of the allocation of time in non-work activities. It sets out a basic theoretical analysis of choice that includes the cost of time on the same footing as the cost of market goods and treats various empirical implications of the theory. These include a new approach to changes in hours of work and leisure, the full integration of so-called productive consumption into economic analysis, a new analysis of the effect of income on the quantity and quality of commodities consumed, some suggestions on the measurement of productivity, an economic analysis of queues and a few others as well. The integration of production and consumption is at odds with the tendency for economists to separate them sharply, production occurring in firms and consumption in households. It should be pointed out, however, that in recent years economists increasingly recognize that a household is truly a small factory. It combines capital goods, raw materials and labor to clean, feed, procreate and otherwise produce useful commodities.
Using a variety of data sets from two countries, we examine possible explanations for the relationship between education and health behaviors, known as the education gradient. We show that income, health insurance, and family background can account for about 30 percent of the gradient. Knowledge and measures of cognitive ability explain an additional 30 percent. Social networks account for another 10 percent. Our proxies for discounting, risk aversion, or the value of future do not account for any of the education gradient, and neither do personality factors such as a sense of control of oneself or over one's life.
This paper constructs a model of saving for retired single people that includes heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies, and bequest motives. We estimate the model using Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old data and the method of simulated moments. Out-of-pocket medical expenses rise quickly with age and permanent income. The risk of living long and requiring expensive medical care is a key driver of saving for many higher-income elderly. Social insurance programs such as Medicaid rationalize the low asset holdings of the poorest but also benefit the rich by insuring them against high medical expenses at the ends of their lives. (c) 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
This paper provides evidence of an education-health relationship among older adults, even after controlling for individual and family background characteristics. It also explores to what extent this relationship represents an independent effect of education on health. An identification strategy using the quarter of birth and a set of parental and sibling characteristics as instrumental variables for education is used to purge estimates of biases resulting from error components correlated with education. The results suggest that the previously observed correlation between educational attainment and adult health has a causal component.
We investigate whether education induces individuals to have healthy lifestyle. To test for causality we instrument education by high school availability and birth order using data of Korean men; to account for correlations among health behaviors, we estimate a quadvariate probit model using simulated MLE. Our results indicate that an increase in education induces individuals to exercise regularly, and to get regular health checkups. We find, however, that education has little effect on smoking or drinking. We also discover that unobserved determinants of health behaviors are correlated, especially between smoking and drinking, and between exercising and getting health checkups.
Men in the United States with family incomes in the top 5 percent of the distribution in 1980 had about 25 percent longer to live than did those in the bottom 5 percent. Proportional increases in income are associated with equal proportional decreases in mortality throughout the income distribution. I discuss possible reasons for this gradient and ask whether it calls for the redistribution of income in the interest of public health. I argue that the existence of the gradient strengthens the case for income redistribution in favor of the poor but that targeting health inequalities would not be sound policy.
This paper tests the hypothesis that education improves health and increases people's life expectancy. It does so by analyzing the effect of education on smoking behaviors. To account for the endogeneity of smoking, the analysis develops an instrumental variable approach which relies on the fact that during the Vietnam War college attendance provided a strategy to avoid the draft. The results indicate that education does affect smoking decisions: educated individuals are less likely to smoke, and among those who initiated smoking, they are more likely to have stopped.
This article begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for devising policies to reduce it.
• Barker hypothesis
• critical periods
• early childhood
• sensitive periods
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effects of this uncertainty, a stochastic dynamic growth model with the public sector is examined. It is shown that deterministic excessive red tape and corruption deteriorate the growth potential through income redistribution and public sector inefficiencies. Most importantly, it is demonstrated that the increase in corruption via higher uncertainty exerts adverse effects on capital accumulation, thus leading to lower growth rates.
In this brief note, I correct a few mistakes in Table 3 of "Does education improve health? A reexamination of the evidence from compulsory schooling laws" published in Economic Perspectives, 2Q, 2008. The corrected results remain consistent with the conclusions of the paper which argued that previous research claiming to show a causal link between education and mortality based on cell-level Census data and using compulsory schooling laws as instruments, is not robust to controls for state-specific cohort trends.
This paper develops asymptotic distribution theory for instrumental variables regression when the partial correlations between the instruments and the endogenous variables are weak, here modeled as local to zero. Asymptotic representation are provided for various statistics, including two-stage least squares and limited information maximum likelihood estimators, Wald statistics, and statistics testing overidentification and endogeneity. The asymptotic distributions provide good approximations to sampling distributions with ten-twenty observations per instrument. The theory suggests concrete guidelines for applied work, including using nonstandard methods for construction of confidence regions. These results are used to interpret J. D. Angrist and A. B. Krueger's (1991) estimates of the returns to education.
We address whether the relationship between education and health can be interpreted causally. Alternatively, both may be determined by common unobserved factors such as individual time preferences. We add to the primarily US-based evidence by using a Danish panel data set of employed persons, and use Danish school reforms to instrument education effects on self-reported health (SRH), body mass index (BMI) and an indicator for never been smoking. Education is related to all three measures in the expected way and the relationships are amplified in magnitude when education is instrumented. However, as the standard errors also increase when using instruments, neither exogeneity nor the null of no effect of education can be rejected for SRH and BMI. We address important criticism of our identification scheme, including tests for presence of weak instruments as suggested by Hahn and Hausman (Econometrica 70 (2002) 163). None of the supplementary analyses reveal problems with the estimation strategy, so the analyses remain inconclusive. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health. This paper examines whether education
has a causal impact on health. I follow synthetic cohorts using successive U.S. censuses to estimate the impact of educational
attainment on mortality rates. I use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education. The results
suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality, and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated
in the literature.
Does schooling affect health behavior? Evidence from the educational expansion in Western Germany
- Jurges