Education, Information, and Improved Health: Evidence from Breast Cancer Screening

Keith Chen and Fabian Lange

No 3548, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: While it is well known that education strongly predicts health, less is known as to why. One reason might be that education improves health-care decision making. In this paper we attempt to disentangle improved decision making from other effects of education, and to quantify how large an impact it has on both a patient’s demand for health services, and that demand’s sensitivity to objective risk factors. We do this by estimating a simple structural model of information acquisition and health decisions for data on women’s self-reported breast-cancer risk and screening behavior. This allows us to separately identify differences in the ability to process health information and differences in overall demand for health. Our results suggest that the observed education gradient in screening stems from a higher willingness-to-pay for health among the educated, but that the main reason why the educated respond more to risk factors in their screening decision is because they are much better informed about the risk factors they face.

Keywords: health; education; allocative efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 I10 I12 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2008-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Journal of Health Economics, 2011, 30 (1), 43-54

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3548.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:iza:izadps:dp3548

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().