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.
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