Efficiency of Health Investment: Education or Intelligence?

Govert Bijwaard and Hans Van Kippersluis

Health Economics, 2016, vol. 25, issue 9, 1056-1072

Abstract: In this paper, we hypothesize that education is associated with a higher efficiency of health investment, yet that this efficiency advantage is solely driven by intelligence. We operationalize efficiency of health investment as the probability of dying conditional on a certain hospital diagnosis and estimate a multistate structural equation model with three states: (i) healthy, (ii) hospitalized, and (iii) death. We use data from a Dutch cohort born around 1940 that links intelligence tests at age 12 years to later‐life hospitalization and mortality records. The results indicate that intelligent individuals have a clear survival advantage for most hospital diagnoses, while the remaining disparities across education groups are small and not statistically significant. © 2016 The Authors. Health Economics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Date: 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3356

Related works:
Working Paper: Efficiency of health investment: education or intelligence? (2015)
Working Paper: Efficiency of Health Investment: Education or Intelligence? (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:25:y:2016:i:9:p:1056-1072

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