Education, Health and Subjective Wellbeing in Europe

Abstract

The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years, life styles, health outputs and functionalities. We however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the US, namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer. Our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in IV estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours' cultural norms.

Visualizing Inequality in Health and Socioeconomic Wellbeing in the EU: Findings from the SHARE Survey

“…Education is often used as a proxy for socio-economic status and its impact on later-life health outcomes is well researched [ 45 , 57 , 58 , 59 ]. This education disparity can be seen in the profiles.…”

“…Marital status and employment status have been classed into binary responses following Albertini and Arpino (2018) [ 44 ]: either the individual has a spouse or they do not (including widowed individuals) and similarly either they are working or they are not (including retired individuals). Education has been classified into four classifications following Becchetti et al (2015) [ 45 ]: no education, primary education, secondary education, and university education. Finally, as the focus of this paper is less on the financial aspects of ageing, the financial metrics were summarized into a combination of whether the respondent received payments from the government and whether they had out-of-pocket medical expenses.…”

Education Not for Money: An Economic Analysis on Education, Civic Engagement and Life Satisfaction

“…4 □ Notice that from condition (20) it is clear that the pursuit of civic engagement is positively correlated with education because the denominator is positive. It crucially depends on 0 γ ε − > which in turn implies that the contribution of education to civic capital is important and more relevant than the self-reinforcing mechanism produced by the pursuit of civic activities on the civic capital itself.…”