The Effect of College Education on Health?

Kasey Buckles, University of Notre Dame
Ofer Malamud, University of Chicago
Abigail Wozniak, University of Notre Dame

We examine the causal impact of education on health outcomes using variation in college attainment induced by draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War. We exploit both national and state-level induction risk to identify the effect of educational attainment on measures of self-reported disability in the 1980, 1990 and 2000 Censuses, and on cohort-level mortality based on Vital Statistics data from 1991 to 2004. Our preferred 2SLS estimates imply that additional years of schooling have no significant impact on several measures of disability and on mortality, in stark contrast to OLS estimates which indicate negative and significant effects of education on disability and mortality.