Do Schooling Reforms Also Improve Long-Run Health?

An association between health and education has been well-established empirically. It is not clear however whether this represents a causal effect and, if so, in which direction. Recent research has attempted to unravel this by using educational reforms, such as compulsory schooling laws, as exogenous sources of variation in education and examining their long-run effects on a variety of health outcomes. When proper account is taken of age, cohort, and state specific effects, it is difficult to establish a credible causal link from educational reforms which affect the quantity of education to health. Thus the balance of research so far suggests that it would be imprudent to assign a causal effect from educational reforms to long-run health.