Education and adult health: Is there a causal effect?

Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo, Pedro Albarrán () and Inigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe
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Pedro Albarrán: Universidad de Alicante

No 19.11, Working Papers from Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Department of Economics

Abstract: Many studies find a strong positive correlation between education and adult health. A subtler question is whether this correlation can be interpreted as a causal relationship. We combine multi-country data from two cross-sections of EU-SILC (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) and use exogenous variation in compulsory years of schooling across countries and cohorts induced by compulsory school laws. We find no causal effect of education on any of our several health measures. This finding is extremely robust to different changes in our main specification and holds using other databases. We discuss different explanations.

Keywords: health; education; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-hea
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http://www.upo.es/serv/bib/wps/econ1911.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Education and adult health: Is there a causal effect? (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pab:wpaper:19.11

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