Health Sciences 3840B Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Init, Social Capital, Natural Experiment
30 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Is health determining education or is education determining health?
Higher education causes better health outcomes
Health causes you to get more education, in poorer health maybe didn’t go to uni for example
There might be no causality at all, but both are determined by something else.
- if one half of the room has a low beta –they would choose to invest less in theirhealth and education
Higher beta –values the future more, invest more into health and education
Could be true but education and health are not related, third factor
U(today) + BU(tomorrow)
Why does this matter?
Policy implications –we need to know if there is a mechanism
If it is (3) increasing the education would not impact health
This example makes it clear
Because of the timing, completing high school would not impact childhood illness because it happens after
So you can’t just try to encourage people to complete HS
This is an obvious example but education and health relationship is less obvious
Stuff we already know
Utility to model choices, Model choices to predict what people will choose in diff circumstances
Demand equation –individuals are different ultimately, there are small diffs in utility
Utility function is slightly diff for everybody
For predicting choices this is fine, can average tastes across a population
When you can’t explain something it’s easy to say that individuals just have diff preferences, but there might be something else going on
Why individuals exhibit diff utilities
Ex. Low beta vs high beta: some people care less about their future than other people. This could be fine for predicting dataand explaining choices.
But we want to think about why, people may not be just born caring less about their future
Why we want to look at mechanisms
We need to before we can identify causality
Idea is that there are some features that are unique to the individuals, and there is some context/environment the individualis in: social networks, family,
neighbourhood
Self is things that are unique to that individual
These things interact –your beliefs about what you can achieve in the future can depend on the neighbourhood you grew up in or SES for example
Make some choices and those choices are going to impact your health
Separate from your choices the environment can also affect your health –ex. If the neighbourhood you live in has a lot of pollution
One plausible way education could affect health
Education -> higher income -> less stressful life, afford gym and healthy foods
Effect of education on health can go through income
If that is all that’s happening you would control for income and see if there’s any effect left (stats)
Look at a group of people who have the same income, within that group see if there’s any relationship between education and health
Still see a relationship whenever you do that
This paper thinks about all the possible mechanisms through which education could affect health
Potential ways that education could affect health
2. Individuals maximizing utility, idea that you’re comparing costs and benefits when you’re making a decision. Sometimes people develop rules of thumb: stuff that is
good or bad, no conscious cost benefit analysis.
3. If you’re more patient, higher value on the future relative to the present, higher beta
Not going to be the case that education changes something about you biologically and that’s what’s going to affect your health –not thinking about these factors
Going through each point in the next slides
Can education affect your perception of your own ability
If you go to a better school does it affect how you see your own capabilities
Example 1
Correlated with their skill or accomplishments
Top line: mechanism
In principle this would go both ways
If kids start with high self concepts can have both a negative and a positive impact
Quality of education can determine whether it is impacting you positively or negatively
Lec 14 Education and Health
May 6, 2018
4:11 PM
Health Economics Page 1
Document Summary
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