The Effect of Education on Health and Mortality: A Review of Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence

Abstract

Education is strongly associated with better health and longer lives. However, the extent to which education causes health and longevity is widely debated. We develop a human capital framework to structure the interpretation of the empirical evidence. We then review evidence on the causal effects of education on mortality and its two most common preventable causes: smoking and obesity. We focus attention on evidence from Randomized Controlled Trials, twin studies, and quasi-experiments. There is no convincing evidence of an effect of education on obesity, and the effects on smoking are only apparent when schooling reforms affect individuals' track or their peer group, but not when they simply increase the duration of schooling. An effect of education on mortality exists in some contexts but not in others, and seems to depend on (i) gender; (ii) the labor market returns to education; (iii) the quality of education; and (iv) whether education affects the quality of individuals' peers.

Health Endowments, Schooling Allocation in the Family, and Longevity: Evidence from US Twins

“…Because effects of education on health and longevity likely differ from country to country, the most relevant results for our paper to compare to are results based on US datasets. However, the popular compulsory schooling law instrumental variable is weak for the US (Galama et al, 2018), while existing twin data results for the US show either little or no effect of education on health. Our results based on well-established methods and new quality data reverse this conclusion by demonstrating causal effects of education on health and longevity.…”

Does Children's Education Improve Parental Health and Longevity? Causal Evidence from Great Britain

“…Third, we employ a regression discontinuity approach to identify the causal effect of children's education on parental mortality and health. Regression discontinuity approaches have an advantage over the instrumental variable approaches used in the existing literature, as the regression discontinuity approach allows to better discern the causal impact of the reform from a secular time trend in the data (Galama et al, 2018). Our fourth minor contribution is to extend our analysis beyond mortality and include self-reported health and long-standing illness as outcomes.…”

“…Those with better education enjoy better health (Galama et al, 2018), and the benefits of education may also spill over to one's peers' health, such as spouses (Huijts et al, 2010) and siblings (Kravdal, 2008). Recently, intergenerational health benefits of education have received increasing attention, as bettereducated parents have healthier children (Vollmer et al, 2017) and parents to better-educated children live longer and healthier Wolfe et al, 2018a,b).…”

Understanding the Mechanisms Linking College Education with Longevity

“…This paper is motivated by the conclusions of a recent comprehensive survey of the literature on the effect of education on health and longevity by Galama, Lleras-Muney, and van Kippersluis (2018). The authors report strong and puzzling heterogeneity in results across quasi-experimental studies linking education with health and longevity, and recommend that future studies move beyond asking whether or not "there is an effect" to tracing the pathways through which education impacts health.…”