The education-health gradient: Revisiting the role of socio-emotional skills

Miriam Gensowski and Mette Gørtz

Journal of Health Economics, 2024, vol. 97, issue C

Abstract: Is the education-health gradient inflated because both education and health are associated with unobserved socio-emotional skills? We find that the gradient in health behaviors and outcomes is reduced by about 15 to 50% from accounting for fine-grained personality facets and up to another 50% from Locus of Control. Traditional aggregated Big-Five scales, however, have a much smaller contribution to the gradient. We use sibling-fixed effects to net out the contribution from genes and shared childhood environment, decomposing the gradient into its components with an order-invariant method. We rely on a large survey (N = 28,261) linked to high-quality Danish administrative registers with information on parental background and objectively measured diagnoses and care use. Accounting for Locus of Control yields the strongest gradient reduction in self-rated health status and objective diagnoses (30%–50%), and in health behaviors the most important factor is Extraversion, a skill that has been shown to be malleable in interventions.

Keywords: Inequality; Health-education gradient; Personality; Big Five-2 inventory; Sibling fixed effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I14 I24 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Working Paper: The Education-Health Gradient: Revisiting the Role of Socio-Emotional Skills (2023)
Working Paper: The Education-Health Gradient: Revisiting the Role of Socio-Emotional Skills (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:97:y:2024:i:c:s0167629624000560

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2024.102911

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