title: Education and Self-Reported Health: Evidence from 23 Countries on the Role of Years of Schooling, Cognitive Skills and Social Capital.
abstract: We examine the contribution of human capital to health in 23 countries worldwide using the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, a unique large-scale international assessment of 16-65 year olds that contains information about self-reported health, schooling, cognitive skills and indicators of interpersonal trust, which represents the cognitive dimension of social capital. We identify cross-national differences in education, skill and social capital gradients in self-reported health and explore the interaction between human capital and social capital to examine if and where social capital is a mediator or a moderator of years of schooling and cognitive abilities. We find large education gaps in self-reported health across all countries in our sample and a strong positive relationship between self-reported health and both literacy and trust in the majority of countries. Education and skill gradients in self-reported health appear to be largest in the United States and smallest in Italy, France, Sweden and Finland. On average around 5.5% of both the schooling gap in self-reported health and the literacy gap in self-reported health can be explained by the higher levels of interpersonal trust that better educated/more skilled individuals have, although the mediating role of trust varies considerably across countries. We find no evidence of a moderation effect: the relationships between health and years of schooling and health and cognitive skills are similar among individuals with different levels of trust.
authors.affiliation: Department for Education and Skills, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris, France.
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Borgonovi
authors.affiliation: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Artur
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pokropek
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D057220:Health Literacy; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D057566:Self Report; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors