Does Higher Education Reduce Mortality? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Felipe González, Luis Martinez (), Pablo Muñoz and Mounu Prem

No 22-134, IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST)

Abstract: We provide new evidence on the causal eect of education on health. Our empirical strategy exploits the reduction in access to college experienced by individuals reaching college age shortly after the 1973 military coup in Chile, which led to a sharp downward kink in enrollment for the aected cohorts. Using data from the vital statistics for the period 1994-2017, we document an upward kink in the age-adjusted yearly mortality rate for these cohorts, a pattern that we also observe in matched individual-level records for hospitalized patients. Leveraging the downward kink in college enrollment, we estimate a negative eect of college on mortality, which is larger for men, but also sizable for women. Aected individuals have worse labor market outcomes, lower income, and are more likely to be enrolled in the public health system. They also report lower consumption of health services, which suggests that economic disadvantage and limited access to care plausibly contribute to the eect of education on health.

Date: 2022-02-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iast.fr/sites/default/files/IAST/wp/wp_iast_134.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
http://iast.fr/pub/126684 null

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Higher Education Reduce Mortality? Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2021)
Working Paper: Does Higher Education Reduce Mortality? Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2021)
Working Paper: Does Higher Education Reduce Mortality? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Chile (2020)
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:tse:iastwp:126684

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().