Parental education and child health: Evidence from a schooling reform

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper investigates the impact of parental education on child health outcomes. To identify the causal effect we explore exogenous variation in parental education induced by a schooling reform in 1947, which raised the minimum school leaving age in the UK. Findings based on data from the National Child Development Study suggest that increasing the school leaving age by 1 year had little effect on the health of their offspring. Schooling did however improve economic opportunities by reducing financial difficulties among households.

Anatomy of a health scare: Education, income and the MMR controversy in the UK

“…As an alternative, Lundborg (2008) uses a representative sample of monozygotic twins and a between-twin fixed effect model to control for genetic and family characteristics, finding that compared to high school dropouts, other individuals have a higher level of self-reported health and fewer chronic health conditions. Regarding the intergenerational effect of education and health, Currie and Moretti (2003), Chou et al (2007), and Chevalier and O'Sullivan (2008) all report positive effects of maternal education on birth weight, in contrast to the findings of Lindeboom et al (2006).…”

Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility

“…The first is the credibility of the instrument; while it is not difficult to determine whether the instrument has a strong first stage, the excludability of the instrument is inherently untestable. For example, changes in 56 Consistently, the available evidence from the UK that uses compulsory schooling laws to estimate the effect of parental education on child health has not found significant effects (Lindeboom et al 2009, Doyle et al 2007). …”

Quality of schooling and inequality of opportunity in health

“…However, recent papers that analyse NCDS data, such as Case et al (2005) and Lindeboom et al (2009), recognise the problem but do not find evidence of bias due to non-random attrition. Analysis of the available data in our sample shows that, on average, individuals in the estimation sample come from slightly richer and better-educated backgrounds when compared with the full sample.…”

“…In terms of parental background, the NCDS allows us to trace the socioeconomic group and the years of schooling of the parents of the cohort-members. Following Case et al (2005) and Lindeboom et al (2009), we have complemented this information with data on the incidence of household financial difficulties during the cohort member's childhood and adolescence.…”