 Education and Health: Where There's Smoke There's an InstrumentWilliam Evans and Edward Montgomery No 4949, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: Victor Fuchs has suggested that the persistent positive correlation between education and health habits can be explained by interpersonal differences in the discount rate. If Fuchs is correct, some health habits can be used as instruments for education in standard wage equations. We use whether an individual smoked at age 18 in such a fashion. The instrument is strongly correlated with years of education, and IV estimates of the return to schooling are 10 percent larger than the OLS estimates. We fail to reject tests of overidentifying restrictions, show how the smoking/education link varies systematically across age cohorts and income groups, and demonstrate that the instrument is correlated with other intertemporal decisions such as home ownership. The results are replicated in four additional data sets, and for both males and females. JEL-codes: I2 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published as Jean Evans, 2010. "Health education," Practical Pre-School, vol 2010(109), pages 11-12. Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4949 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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