The Effect of College Education on Health

Kasey Buckles, Andreas Hagemann (), Ofer Malamud, Melinda Morrill and Abigail Wozniak

No 19222, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We exploit exogenous variation in college completion induced by draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War to examine the impact of college completion on adult mortality. Our preferred estimates imply that increasing college completion rates from the level of the state with the lowest induced rate to the highest would decrease cumulative mortality by 28 percent relative to the mean. Most of the reduction in mortality is from deaths due to cancer and heart disease. We also explore potential mechanisms, including differential earnings, health insurance, and health behaviors, using data from the Census, ACS, and NHIS.

JEL-codes: I12 I23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hea and nep-sea
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Published as Journal of Health Economics Volume 50, December 2016, Pages 99-114

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Working Paper: The Effect of College Education on Health (2012)
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