The effect of early-life education on later-life mortality.
Many studies link cross-state variation in compulsory schooling laws to early-life educational attainment, thereby providing a plausible way to investigate the causal impact of education on various lifetime outcomes. We use this strategy to estimate the effect of education on older-age mortality of individuals born in the early twentieth century U.S. Our key innovation is to combine U.S. Census data and the complete Vital Statistics records to form precise mortality estimates by sex, birth cohort, and birth state. In turn we find that virtually all of the variation in these mortality rates is captured by cohort effects and state effects alone, making it impossible to reliably tease out any additional impact due to changing educational attainment induced by state-level changes in compulsory schooling.
University of Chicago, NORC, and IZA, United States.
Dan A
DA
Black
University of Chicago and NORC, United States.
Yu-Chieh
YC
Hsu
Carnegie Mellon University, NORC, NBER and IZA, United States. Electronic address: lt20@andrew.cmu.edu.
Lowell J
LJ
Taylor
D004493:Education / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D037141:Mandatory Programs; D009026:Mortality / Q000639:trends*; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012574:Schools / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013219:State Government; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology
Education; Mortality