Education and Self-Reported Health: Evidence from 23 Countries on the Role of Years of Schooling, Cognitive Skills and Social Capital

Francesca Borgonovi and Artur Pokropek

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 2, 1-16

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.

Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0149716

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149716

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