EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Causal Impact of Education on Mental Health and Explanatory Mechanisms

Aysun Aygün ()
Additional contact information
Aysun Aygün: Istanbul Technical UniversityAuthor-Name: Abdullah Tirgil

No 1703, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: This paper investigates the causal relationship between education and mental health in Turkey. We rely on the quasi-experimental setting created by the 1997 compulsory education reform that raised the compulsory years of schooling from five to eight years. Using regression discontinuity design, we use the birth year to indicate reform exposure and identify the causal effects of longer years of schooling on mental health. Our results demonstrate a sizable negative impact of education on the mental health scale. We present evidence that the reform had a more adverse effect on men's mental health. There is also heterogeneity by the place of residence, as the longer school years led people who live in urban areas to experience worse mental health outcomes. By investigating possible mechanisms, we show that those with at least a middle school education did not invest more in their health than those without a middle school diploma. We explain the evidence for the adverse effects of education on mental health, especially experienced by those who face higher competition in the labor market, by the lack of an increase in household income despite the longer years in school.

Pages: 46
Date: 2024-01-20, Revised 2024-01-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
https://erf.org.eg/publications/the-causal-impact- ... lanatory-mechanisms/ (application/pdf)
https://bit.ly/485rLgK (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erg:wpaper:1703

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:erg:wpaper:1703