Understanding the Mechanisms Linking College Education with Longevity

Abstract

Funders had no involvement in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data; in the writing of the manuscript; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. We thank Max Sacher for his excellent research assistance. William Anderson, Atticus Bolyard, Xiaoyu (Nancy) Chen, and Isabel Haber provided great help with proofreading the manuscript. Supplementary materials may be retrieved from https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/pasavelyev/wlsmediationwebappx.

Health endowments, schooling allocation in the family, and longevity: Evidence from US twins

“…This question is often addressed in the literature by using changes in compulsory schooling laws or the birth of twins as natural experiments. Other methods include randomized controlled trials, which usually work at low levels of education such as preschool (e.g., Conti et al, 2016), military draft used as instrument for men's education (Buckles et al, 2016), and methods that explicitly model unobserved heterogeneity (e.g., Bijwaard et al, 2015;Conti and Heckman, 2010;Hong et al, 2020;Savelyev, 2020;Savelyev and Tan, 2019). See Grossman (2015) and Galama et al (2018) for recent surveys.…”

The demand for health turns 50: Reflections

“…Thanks to him, the cumulative percentage of papers that report a positive causal effect of schooling on health is more like Ted Williams's batting average of 406 in the 1941 Major League baseball season than my lifetime batting average of 194 over two seasons in the Rockaways Veterans of Foreign Wars League and one season in the same area's American Legion League. In four papers published between 2019 and 2022 (Hong, Savelyev, and Tan, 2020;Savelyev, 2022;Savelyev and Tan, 2019;Savelyev, Ward, Krueger, and McGue, 2022) and one working paper that I'm sure will be published very soon (Bolyard & Savelyev, 2021), Savelyev and his colleagues use all three econometric techniques to investigate causality to conclude that adult schooling causes a variety of health outcomes and health behaviors. While Savelyev is not the first person to investigate the relationship between health and schooling, he is the first one to present as much evidence from as many different data sets, with as many highly novel and sophisticated econometric techniques.…”

Education and COVID-19 excess mortality

“…Viceversa, its beneficial effect on selfreported health and depression is larger among women than men. More recently, Hong et al 2020, estimate the effect of college vs non-college education in the US and conclude that while education improves health at a later age for both genders, it has a larger effect on life expectancy at age 53 among men (3.3 years) than among women (0.5 years). Surprisingly, little attention has been devoted to the role of education in the COVID-19 pandemic, despite education shapes individual ability to elaborate information, to judge their credibility and to discriminate between contrasting indications.…”