The Roles of High School Completion and GED Receipt in Smoking and Obesity

Abstract

We analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to explore the relationships between high school completion and the two leading preventable causes of death -smoking and obesity. We focus on three issues that have received a great deal of attention in research on the pecuniary returns to schooling. First, we investigate whether GED recipients differ from other high school graduates in their smoking and obesity behaviors. Second, we explore the extent to which the relationships between schooling and these health-related behaviors are sensitive to controlling for family background measures and cognitive ability. Third, we estimate instrumental variables (IV) models of the impact of schooling on smoking and obesity. Although our IV estimates are imprecise, both the OLS and IV results tend to suggest that the returns to high school completion include a reduction in smoking. We find little evidence that high school completion is associated with a lower probability of being overweight or obese for either men or women. The results also suggest that the health returns to GED receipt are much smaller than the returns to high school completion.

The role of education in the production of health: An empirical analysis of smoking behavior

“…8 We take the expectation of Eq. (4.1) conditional on each respondent's age, education, and student status in the 2 years they participate in the panel, where m it denotes an indicator variable for whether individual i can be matched from the survey given in 7 The linear probability model has been widely employed in the smokingeducation literature (de Walque, 2007b;Grimard and Parent, 2007;Kenkel et al, 2006;Currie and Moretti, 2003). The motivation for using a linear probability model in these analyzes differs, however.…”

“…The instruments employed by Kenkel et al (2006) measure the cost and difficulty of graduating from high school, while Currie and Moretti (2003) use the availability of a local college as an instrument. 4 Both conclude that education significantly reduces the propensity to smoke, although Kenkel et al find that education has an effect for only males, and only for current smoking status (but not former smoking status).…”

Intelligence and past use of recreational drugs

“…Several researchers have presented evidence that more intelligent people are less likely to smoke (Heckman et al, 2006;Kenkel et al, 2006;Taylor et al, 2003). Evidence concerning the relationship between intelligence and alcohol abuse is mixed, with researchers reporting evidence of a positive relationship (Batty et al, 2008;Hatch et al, 2007), a negative relationship (Batty et al, 2006;Clarke & Haughton, 1975;Sander, 1999) and a null relationship (Kubicka, Matejcek, Dytrych, & Roth, 2001;Mortensen, Sorensen, & Gronbaek, 2005;Wennberg, Andersson, & Bohman, 2002).…”

“…Recreational drugs, including alcohol and cigarettes, contribute to about 22% of all deaths (Mokdad, Marks, Stroup, & Gerberding, 2004). Several researchers have shown that intelligence is negatively related to smoking and alcohol abuse later in life (Batty et al, 2006;Heckman, Stixrud, & Urzua, 2006;Kenkel, Lillard, & Mathios, 2006;Sander, 1999;Taylor et al, 2003;Wilmoth, 2010).…”

The causal effect of schooling on smoking behavior

“…An extensive literature has found evidence of a causal relationship between education and self-evaluations of health status, blood pressure and mortality for a number of countries including the United Kingdom (Aizer & Stroud, 2010;Kemptner, Jürges, & Reinhold, 2011;Lleras-Muney, 2005;Mazumder, 2008;Oreopoulos, 2006;Powdthavee, 2010;Silles, 2009;Van Kippersluis, O'Donnell, & Van Doorslaer, 2011). A number of previous studies for the United States have also found evidence of a causal relationship between education and cigarette smoking (see, for example, De Walque, 2007, 2010; Grimard & Parent, 2007;Kenkel, Lillard, & Mathios, 2006;and Sanders, 1995). This paper isolates the causal effect of schooling on smoking decisions using changes in mandatory schooling laws for Great Britain and Northern Ireland to generate exogenous variation in schooling.…”