The Long Reach of Education: Health, Wealth, and DI Participation

James Poterba, Steven Venti and David Wise ()

No 23307, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Education is strongly related to participation in the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program. To explore this relationship, we describe the correlation between education and DI participation, and then explore how four factors related to education – health, wealth, occupation, and employment – feature in this correlation. We label these four factors “pathway” variables. We find that a large component of the relationship between education and DI participation – more than one-third for men, and over two-thirds for women – can be attributed to the correlation of education with health, and of health with DI receipt. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study for the 1992-2012 period to explore the corresponding roles for each of the pathway variables, and also to study how changes over time in these variables, such as the widening gap between the health status of those with high and low educational attainment, have affected DI participation.

JEL-codes: H53 H55 I26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-ias, nep-lma and nep-pbe
Note: AG PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23307.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:23307

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23307

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().