Education and health knowledge: evidence from UK compulsory schooling reforms

David Johnston, Grace Lordan, Michael Shields and Agne Suziedelyte

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We investigate if there is a causal link between education and health knowledge using data from the 1984/85 and 1991/92 waves of the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS). Uniquely, the survey asks respondents what they think are the main causes of ten common health conditions, and we compare these answers to those given by medical professionals to form an index of health knowledge. For causal identification we use increases in the UK minimum school leaving age in 1947 (from 14 to 15) and 1972 (from 15 to 16) to provide exogenous variation in education. These reforms predominantly induced adolescents who would have left school to stay for one additionally mandated year. Naïve ordinary least squares estimates suggest that education significantly increases health knowledge, with a one-year increase in schooling increasing the health knowledge index by 15% of a standard deviation. In contrast, estimates from instrumental-variable models show that increased schooling due to the education reforms did not significantly affect health knowledge: a one-year increase in schooling is estimated to decrease the health knowledge index by 0.1% of a standard deviation. This main result is robust to numerous specification tests and alternative formulations of the health knowledge index. Further research is required to determine whether there is also no causal link between higher levels of education – such as post-school qualifications – and health knowledge.

Keywords: Education; health; knowledge; compulsory schooling; causality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I12 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-edu and nep-knm
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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60445/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Education and health knowledge: Evidence from UK compulsory schooling reform (2015)
Working Paper: Education and Health Knowledge: Evidence from UK Compulsory Schooling Reforms (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:60445

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