Education and gender differences in mortality rates

Cristina Bellés-Obrero, Sergi Jimenez-Martin and Judit Vall Castello

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: We examine the gender asymmetries in the health benefits of acquiring further education at a time of increasing gender equality and women’s greater access to economic opportunities. A labor market reform in Spain in 1980 raised the minimum legal working age from 14 to 16, while the school-leaving age remained at 14. We apply a difference-in-difference strategy to identify the reform’s within-cohort effects, where treated and control individuals differ only in their month of birth. Although the reform improved the educational attainment of both women and men, the long-term effects over mortality differ by gender. We find that the reform decreased mortality at young ages (14-29) by 6.3% among men and by 8.9% among women. This was driven by a decrease (12.2% for men, 14.7% for women) in the probability of dying from external causes of death (accidents). However, we also find that the child labor reform increased mortality for prime-age women (30-45) by 6.3%. This effect is driven by increases in HIV mortality (11.6%), as well as by diseases of the nervous and circulatory system (8.7%). This pattern helps explain the narrowing age gap in life expectancy between women and men in Spain.

Keywords: minimum working age; education; mortality; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I20 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1660.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Education and Gender Differences in Mortality Rates (2019)
Working Paper: Education and Gender Differences in Mortality Rates (2019)
Working Paper: Education and Gender Differences in Mortality Rates (2019)
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:upf:upfgen:1660

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).