This is a past event
This is a joint seminar from the University of Aberdeen Business School and HERU. Dr Matt Dickson from the University of Bath will present the seminar.
Title: The causal effects of education on adult health, mortality and income: evidence from Mendelian Randomization and the raising of the school leaving age.
Abstract: On average, people with more education are healthier, wealthier and have higher life expectancy than those with less education. In this paper, we investigate the causal effect of education on health and health behaviours exploiting two natural experiments. The first is a compulsory schooling reform in the UK in 1972 which generated a discontinuous increase in average education for the cohorts affected. The second uses perturbation of germline genetic variation associated with education which occurs at conception, known as Mendelian Randomization. The first strategy identifies a ‘local average treatment effect of education’ for those at the lower end of the distribution. In contrast, the increases in education associated with Mendelian Randomization occur across the education distribution. Much of the previous literature suggests that the differences in health outcomes associated with education are largely driven by selection into education on factors that also impact the outcomes. In contrast, the two independent sources of variation we exploit largely imply consistent causal effects of education. The congruence of the estimates from the two instrumental variables strategies strongly suggests that education causally affects health outcomes and that the size of the impact is similar across the education distribution.
- Hosted by
- Dr Yu Aoki
- Venue
- Craig Suite 706, The Sir Duncan Rice Library