Causal Effects of Schooling on Adult and Child Health

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Schooling is positively associated with better health-related behaviors and better health/mortality outcomes in most countries, both directly and indirectly through various pathways. But these associations do not measure by how much schooling causes better health-related behaviors and better health/mortality outcomes. Schooling may be proxying in part for unobserved endowments including family background and genetics that have causal effects on health behaviors and health/mortality outcomes. This project's principal goal is to investigate causal pathways linking schooling to health and mortality, net of endowments, using five data sets on twins from China, Denmark and the U.S. Though the information overlap across the data sets is large, each has different strengths. By examining them together there is the promise of a quantum increase in understanding of causal effects of schooling on health-related behaviors and health/mortality outcomes, net of endowments, for females and males in different birth cohorts in different contexts. Specific aims are: (1) To investigate reduced-form relations, net of endowments, between own schooling and own and spouse health-related behaviors and health outcomes and child health outcomes. (2) To investigate indirect pathways - such as prior health-related behaviors, health status, marital status -- through which schooling affects own and spouse health-related behaviors and health outcomes and child health outcomes. (3) To investigate to what extent schooling investments respond to health and other endowments associated with the pathways. (4) To investigate to what extent the estimates above differ (a) if endowments are ignored or represented imperfectly, (b) between females and males, (c) across birth cohorts, (d) for individuals with genetic predispositions towards certain diseases, (e) across schooling levels due to nonlinearities, (f) if characteristics of schools and not just grades of schooling are considered, (g) for health-related behaviors versus health outcomes, (h) for physical versus mental/psychological health, (i) for different market and policy contexts.