Working Paper: NBER ID: w9185
Authors: Adriana Lleras-Muney; Frank R. Lichtenberg
Abstract: There is a large body of work that documents a strong, positive correlation between education and measures of health, but little is known about the mechanisms by which education might affect health. One possibility is that more educated individuals are more likely to adopt new medical technologies. We investigate this theory by asking whether more educated people are more likely to use newer drugs, while controlling for other individual characteristics, such as income and insurance status. Using the 1997 MEPS, we find that more highly educated people are more likely to use drugs more recently approved by the FDA. We find that education only matters for individuals who repeatedly purchase drugs for a given condition, suggesting that the more educated are better able to learn from experience.
Keywords: education; medical technology; drug adoption; health disparities
JEL Codes: I12; I21
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| education (I29) | ability to learn from experience (G53) |
| education (I29) | access to information (L86) |
| education (I29) | evaluations of risks and benefits (H43) |
| income, insurance status (G52) | adoption of newer drugs (O30) |
| education (I29) | health outcomes (I14) |
| education (I29) | adoption of newer drugs (O30) |