Schooling, cognitive ability and health

Abstract

A large literature documents a strong correlation between health and educational outcomes. In this paper we investigate the role of cognitive ability in the health-education nexus. Using NLSY data, we show that one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability is associated with roughly the same increase in health as two years of schooling and that cognitive ability accounts for roughly one quarter of the association between schooling and health. Both schooling and ability are strongly associated with health at low levels but less related or unrelated at high levels. Estimates treating schooling as endogenous to health suggest that much of the correlation between schooling and health is attributable to unobserved heterogeneity; the causal effect of schooling on health is large only for respondents with low levels of schooling and low cognitive ability. An implication is that policies which increase schooling will only increase health to the extent that they increase the education of poorly-educated individuals. Subsidies to college education, for example, are unlikely to increase population health.

Intelligence and past use of recreational drugs

“…The improvement in R 2 is significant if and only if the coefficient on the variable added is significantly different from zero (Wooldridge, 2006). AFQT scores are affected by education (Hansen, Heckman, & Mullen, 2004;Neal & Johnson, 1996;Winship & Korenman, 2010) and researchers have sometimes adjusted scores to account for differences in education at the time of testing (Auld & Sidhu, 2005). Intelligence has not been defined here as inherent ability, so no adjustments have been made here.…”

“…More intelligent people have lower mortality rates (Gottfredson & Deary, 2004) and fewer health limitations in their ability to work (Auld & Sidhu, 2005). It has been argued that the relationship between intelligence and health is partly driven by differences in the use of recreational drugs (Batty et al, 2006;Gottfredson, 2004).…”

“…Intelligence is positively related to health (Auld & Sidhu, 2005;Gottfredson & Deary, 2004). This relationship may be partly driven by differences in the use of recreational drugs (Batty, Deary, & Macintyre, 2006;Gottfredson, 2004).…”

Education and health: The role of cognitive ability

“…Yet, the association between education and health could also stem from (i) ‘reverse causality’, in which childhood ill-health constrains educational attainment (Behrman and Rosenzweig, 2004; Case et al 2005), and (ii) confounding ‘third factors’ such as ability, parental background and time preference that influence both education and health outcomes (Fuchs, 1982; Auld and Sidhu, 2005; Deary, 2008). …”

“…1 Some recent economic studies report associations between childhood cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, and health outcomes at ages 30–40 using the British Cohort Study (Murasko, 2007), the U.K. National Child Development Study (Carneiro et al 2007), the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (Auld and Sidhu, 2005; Kaestner and Collison, 2011), or the Dutch ‘Brabant data’ (Cramer, 2012). It is established that cognitive ability and some non-cognitive factors such as self-esteem and conscientiousness are associated with health outcomes.…”