University of Leicester
Browse
- No file added yet -

The effect of education on health: Evidence from the 1997 compulsory schooling reform in Turkey

Download (3.84 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2020-04-23, 16:03 authored by BH Baltagi, A Flores-Lagunes, HM Karatas
This paper analyzes the relationship between education and health outcomes using a natural experiment in Turkey. The compulsory schooling increased from 5 to 8 years in 1997. This increase was accompanied by a massive construction of classrooms and recruitment of teachers in a differential rate across regions. As in previous studies, we confirm that the 1997 reform substantially increased education in Turkey. Using the number of new middle school class openings per 1000 children as an intensity measure for the 1997 reform, we find that, on average, one additional middle school class increases the probability of completion of 8 years or more of schooling by about 7.1 percentage points. We use this exogenous increase in the educational attainment to investigate the impact of education on body mass index, obesity, smoking behavior, and self-rated health, as well as the effect of maternal education on the infant's well-being. Using ordinary least squares, we find that there is a statistically significant favorable effect of education on health outcomes and behavior. However, this relationship becomes insignificant when we account for the endogeneity of education and health by instrumenting education with exogenous variations generated by the 1997 reform and the accompanying middle school class openings. The insignificance of the health effect may be due to lack of statistical power in our data, or to the fact that this policy affects only relatively low levels of schooling and the health effects of education need to be examined at higher levels of schooling.

History

Citation

Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2019, 77, pp. 205-221

Author affiliation

School of Business

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Regional Science and Urban Economics

Volume

77

Pagination

205-221

Publisher

Elsevier

issn

0166-0462

eissn

1879-2308

Acceptance date

2019-05-03

Copyright date

2019

Publisher version

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046218303697#abs0015

Language

en

Usage metrics

    University of Leicester Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC