The Impact of Education on Health Knowledge

Abstract

The theory on the demand for health suggests that schooling causes health because schooling increases the efficiency of health production. Alternatively, the allocative efficiency hypothesis argues that schooling alters the input mix chosen to produce health. This suggests that the more educated have more knowledge about the health production function and they have more health knowledge. This paper uses data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the NLSY97 to conduct an investigation of the allocative efficiency hypothesis by analyzing whether education improves health knowledge. The survey design allows us to observe the increase in health knowledge of young adults after their level of schooling is increased by differential and plausibly exogenous amounts. Using nine different questions measuring health knowledge, we find weak evidence that an increase in education generates an improvement in health knowledge for those who ultimately attend college. For those with high school as the terminal degree, no relationship is found between education and health knowledge. These results imply that the allocative efficiency hypothesis may not be the primary reason for why schooling impacts health outcomes.

The health knowledge mechanism: evidence on the link between education and health lifestyle in the Philippines

“…The findings stand in stark contrast to the previous literature, which either suggests that education may not have a strong effect on knowledge [3,37], or that knowledge only plays a minor role in the education-health lifestyle relationship [14,41,48].…”

“…Few studies have tried to identify the direct effect of education on health knowledge KE , which can be understood as a pre-requisite for the allocative efficiency argument to hold. [3] use two waves of the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The data contains information about individuals who were aged 12-16 in the initial survey period in 1996.…”

“…Taking the non-medical background of the survey respondents into account, some answer rules are rather simple and only control for respondent's basic understanding of a method or disease. 3 If an open question required several correct answers, the answer rule represents a minimum number of correct answers. This number was defined based on a median split, such that the item was classified as correct for not more than 50% of the sample.…”

Towards global Guinea worm eradication in 2015: the experience of South Sudan

“…Such policies should describe effective approaches to health education, frequency of contact with Guinea worm endemic communities and nomadic populations, evaluation mechanisms, language translations for health education booklets, and capacity building of the health education workforce, particularly of volunteers with limited health care delivery knowledge and competencies. It is possible to accumulate and apply health knowledge without formal academic education, 48 provided Guinea worm health educators are competent, utilize culturally appropriate language, and adapt evidence-based health education techniques. 49 The strength of traditional beliefs and treatment-seeking behavior in affected communities need to be better understood.…”

Evidence on the efficacy of school-based incentives for healthy living

“…For example, see LlerasMuney (2005), Kenkel, Lillard, and Mathios (2006), Groot and van den Brink (2007), Silles (2009), Albouy andLequien (2009), Tenn, Herman, andWendling (2010), Altindag, Cannonier, and Mocan (2011), Jurges, Steffen, and Salm (2011), McCrary and Royer (2011). Besides Just and Price (2011), which is discussed in more detail below, the only other papers that consider the contemporaneous relationship between schooling and health are Kaestner and Grossman (2009), who consider the relationship between weight and student achievement, Rees and Sabia (2010) and Dills, Morgan, and Rotthoff (2011), who consider the effect of exercise on academic performance, and Hansen and Lang (2011) who find a positive relationship between being in school and the probability of suicide.…”