The role of education in the production of health: An empirical analysis of smoking behavior

Steven Tenn, Douglas A. Herman and Brett Wendling

Journal of Health Economics, 2010, vol. 29, issue 3, 404-417

Abstract: We estimate the effect of education on smoking. Our estimation strategy "differences out" the impact of unobserved characteristics correlated with education by exploiting education differences between similarly selected groups 1 year apart in their life cycle. Individuals with a given age, education, and student status in the current and previous year are compared to their counterparts born 1 year later with the same age, education, and student status in the following and current year. We find that an additional year of education does not have a causal effect on smoking. Unobserved factors correlated with education entirely explain their cross-sectional relationship.

Keywords: Education; Health; Smoking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-6296(10)00042-1
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jhecon:v:29:y:2010:i:3:p:404-417

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().