Education is strongly associated with better health and longer lives. However, the extent to which education causes health and longevity is widely debated. We develop a human capital framework to structure the interpretation of the empirical evidence. We then review evidence on the causal effects of education on mortality and its two most common preventable causes: smoking and obesity. We focus attention on evidence from Randomized Controlled Trials, twin studies, and quasi-experiments. There is no convincing evidence of an effect of education on obesity, and the effects on smoking are only apparent when schooling reforms affect individuals' track or their peer group, but not when they simply increase the duration of schooling. An effect of education on mortality exists in some contexts but not in others, and seems to depend on (i) gender; (ii) the labor market returns to education; (iii) the quality of education; and (iv) whether education affects the quality of individuals' peers.

We use matching combined with difference-in-differences to identify the causal effects of sudden illness, represented by acute hospitalizations, on employment and income up to six years after the health shock using linked Dutch hospital and tax register data. An acute hospital admission lowers the employment probability by seven percentage points and results in a five percent loss of personal income two years after the shock. There is no subsequent recovery in either employment or income. There are large spillover effects: household income falls by 50 percent more than the income of the disabled person.

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The self-employed are often reported to be healthier than wage workers; however, the cause of this health difference is largely unknown. The longitudinal nature of the US Health and Retirement Study allows us to gauge the plausibility of two competing explanations for this difference: a contextual effect of self-employment on health (benefit effect), or a health-related selection of individuals into self-employment (barrier effect). Our main finding is that the selection of comparatively healthier individuals into self-employment accounts for the positive cross-sectional difference. The results rule out a positive contextual effect of self-employment on health, and we present tentative evidence that, if anything, engaging in self-employment is bad for one’s health. Given the importance of the self-employed in the economy, these findings contribute to our understanding of the vitality of the labor force.