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Author: Duke, Naomi
Resulting in 2 citations.
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Duke, Naomi Macmillan, Ross |
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Is Educational Attainment a Cause of Better Health? A Test of Conventional Wisdom Presented: Budapest, Hungary, European Population Conference, June 2014 Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: European Association for Population Studies (EAPS) Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Modeling, Fixed Effects Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Research routinely finds a strong association between educational attainment and better health. The conventional interpretation of this association is causal, premised on basic ideas of education and human capital enhancement. An alternative perspective views educational attainment as somewhat endogenous given cognitive and non-cognitive skills that are formed early in the life course. By implication, this perspective would view the association between educational attainment and health as spurious. Using data from the NLSY97 and dynamic measures of both educational attainment and self-rated health, we evaluate these two perspectives. Specifically, we fit conventional ordinary least squares and maximum likelihood, fixed effects regression models where the latter can control for time-stable, unmeasured heterogeneity such as cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Contrary to conventional wisdom, results provide little support for the human capital and causation interpretation. Specifically, once controlling for unmeasured heterogeneity, the effects of education are either eliminated or reduced such that they would be deemed trivial to small. These conclusions are reinforced when we include a set of time-varying covariates that are robust predictors of health and when we examine such effects for six race-sex subgroups. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research on socioeconomic stratification and health. |
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Bibliography Citation
Duke, Naomi and Ross Macmillan. "Is Educational Attainment a Cause of Better Health? A Test of Conventional Wisdom." Presented: Budapest, Hungary, European Population Conference, June 2014. |
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Duke, Naomi Macmillan, Ross |
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Schooling, Skills, and Self-rated Health: A Test of Conventional Wisdom on the Relationship between Educational Attainment and Health Sociology of Education 89,3 (July 2016): 171-206. Also: http://soe.sagepub.com/content/89/3/171 Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: American Sociological Association Keyword(s): Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Cognitive Ability; Educational Attainment; Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Heterogeneity; Noncognitive Skills Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Education is a key sociological variable in the explanation of health and health disparities. Conventional wisdom emphasizes a life course--human capital perspective with expectations of causal effects that are quasi-linear, large in magnitude for high levels of educational attainment, and reasonably robust in the face of measured and unmeasured explanatory factors. We challenge this wisdom by offering an alternative theoretical account and an empirical investigation organized around the role of measured and unmeasured cognitive and noncognitive skills as confounders in the association between educational attainment and health. Based on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 spanning mid-adolescence through early adulthood, results indicate that (1) effects of educational attainment are vulnerable to issues of omitted variable bias, (2) measured indicators of cognitive and noncognitive skills account for a significant proportion of the traditionally observed effect of educational attainment, (3) such skills have effects larger than that of even the highest levels of educational attainment when appropriate controls for unmeasured heterogeneity are incorporated, and (4) models that most stringently control for such time-stable abilities show little evidence of a substantive association between educational attainment and health. |
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Bibliography Citation
Duke, Naomi and Ross Macmillan. "Schooling, Skills, and Self-rated Health: A Test of Conventional Wisdom on the Relationship between Educational Attainment and Health." Sociology of Education 89,3 (July 2016): 171-206.
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