Schooling in Health

Empirical Studies on the Role of Schooling in Health

Recent evidence supports the view that education makes one a more efficient producer of health (Lleras-Muney, 2005). Knowing that compulsory education laws came into being in various places at various times in the twentieth century, she reasoned that the related birth cohorts from that era would

have experienced different levels of education but would have been similar in many other respects. This formed a natural experiment in which she could analyze the survival patterns of these people to detect a pure influence of education on health. Furthermore, the education laws could not have been directly manipulated by the study subjects, so they were good “instruments” for education. By this approach, she was able to conclude that education has a clear, causal, and positive effect on health. By 1960, the early century education experience appeared to have increased life years by 1.7 years, a substantial increase and one not due to time preferences of the subjects. Lleras-Muney’s study inspired new research of the effects of new laws extending the length of compulsory education in England and Ireland (Oreopoulus, 2006; Auld and Sidhu, 2005). These supported the earlier findings; an additional year of schooling caused an improvement in the affected student’s health. To emphasize, the improved health was experienced by “likely dropouts,” forced by the law to attend one more year of high school. Interestingly, Lindeboom and colleagues (2006) inquired through research as to whether the children born later on to these students also benefited from improved health, but the findings indicated that they did not. In summary, research has supported the theory that education makes people more
efficient producers of their own health. Cutler and Lleras-Muney (2006) add further support in their recent work by showing that education is associated statistically with better reasoned choices of health related behaviors. One finds as well that education plays a stronger role in health for cases where new medical knowledge is more important.

CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, we investigated many topics related both directly and indirectly to the production of health. The health production function exhibits the law of diminishing marginal returns. While the total contribution of health care is substantial, the marginal product is often small. Historically, we found that much of the decline in mortality rates occurred prior to the introduction of specific,

effective medical interventions. Thus, historically the contributions of health care, at least as provided by the health practitioner, were probably small until well into the twentieth century. The small, modern-day marginal product of health care is statistically significant. Health care benefits people differentially and is generally more productive on the margin for women and blacks. Similarly, certain categories of health care have greater marginal effects on the population than others; prenatal care programs are examples of the more productive categories. Education has a strong association with health status. Whether this means that it causally improves health has long been an issue of contention. Recent research supports the view that education improves health.