Presenter:

Mark Stehr

Authors:

Mark Stehr

Chair: James Burgess; Discussant: James Burgess Wed June 7, 2006 8:00-9:30 Room 225

Economists have expended a great deal of effort to determine the effect of education on wages and productivity. Recent research has broadened the scope of this investigation to include the non-pecuniary benefits that education may provide such as improvements in health. Lleras Muney (2002) finds that high school education decreases mortality, but is silent on the exact mechanisms through which education operates. DeWalque (2003) shows that college education has a causal role in lowering smoking rates, but more research is needed to understand the other channels through which education exerts its positive influence on health. At the same time, economists are actively investigating the relationship between markers of socioeconomic status, such as income and education, and child health (see Currie and Stabile, 2003).

This paper tests the hypothesis that more schooling at the college level leads to (a) lower levels of obesity and (b) lower levels of obesity among one’s children. Obesity is a particularly important health outcome because it is rapidly approaching smoking as a cause of premature morbidity and mortality. This hypothesis cannot be tested by examining a simple association between education and body mass index (BMI) because both of these outcomes may be influenced by unobservable characteristics of the individual. For example, the relative value individuals place on current and future consumption may vary. Those who place a high value on future consumption may make large investments in education and health while they are young that involve sacrifices in the form of foregone wages and leisure time. Those who place a high value on current consumption may not be willing to make these sacrifices when they are young, and as a consequence may enjoy lower earnings and health when they are older. Thus, to infer from the simple association between education and BMI that education reduces obesity risk is invalid.

Ideally, to isolate the effect of education on obesity, one would randomly assign individuals to different education levels and then follow the evolution of their BMI over time. Because this is clearly infeasible, I instead use a quasi-experimental design that attempts to mimic this random assignment. Use of this quasi-experiment requires that the experiment predict education, but have no direct effect on BMI. My quasi-experiment is the number of colleges and universities in an individual’s county of residence at age 17. Previous researchers have relied on this quasi-experiment to study the effect of education on wages (Card, 1995) and civic participation (Dee, 2004). To acquire data on schools, I use the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), which provides data on the number of 2-year and 4-year colleges in each county in the United States. Then, I match this measure of college availability by county with respondents from the NLSY79 and their children from the NLSY79 Child/Young Adult Survey. Preliminary OLS results indicate a strong negative association between education and obesity, but it is too early to report results from the quasi-experimental research design outlined above.