Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP14084
Authors: Katharina Janke; David Johnston; Carol Propper; Michael Shields
Abstract: We study the causal impact of education on chronic health conditions by exploitng two UK education policy reforms. The first reform raised the minimum school leaving age in 1972 and affected the lower end of the educational attainment distribution. The second reform is a combination of several policy changes that affected the broader educational attainment distribution in the early 1990s. Results are consistent across both reforms: an extra year of schooling has no statistically identifiable impact on the prevalence of most chronic health conditions. The exception is that both reforms led to a statistically significant reduction in the probability of having diabetes, and this result is robust across model specifications. However, even with the largest survey samples available in the UK, we are unable to statistically rule out moderate size educational effects for many of the other health conditions, although we generally find considerably smaller effects than OLS associations suggest.
Keywords: education; reform; chronic illness; causality
JEL Codes: I14; I24; I26
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Additional year of schooling (I21) | Chronic health conditions (most) (I12) |
| Education (I29) | Chronic ill health (I12) |
| Education (I29) | Self-reported diabetes (I12) |
| Education (I29) | Cardiovascular disease (I12) |
| Broader educational changes in the 1990s (I28) | Probability of having diabetes (C46) |
| Additional year of schooling (I21) | Probability of having diabetes (C46) |
| 1972 ROSLA reform (K16) | Probability of having diabetes (C46) |