The relationship between education and mortality: An analysis for the United States using a unique social experiment

The purpose of this dissertation is to determine whether education has a causal effect on health, in particular on mortality. Prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health but it is not known whether this relationship is causal.; To answer the question of whether education causes health, I exploit a unique quasi-natural experiment: between 1915 and 1939 at least 30 states changed their compulsory attendance and child labor laws. If these laws forced individuals to get more schooling than they would have otherwise chosen, and if education affects health, then individuals who spent their teens in states that required them to go to school for more years should be relatively healthier.; These laws are a valid experiment for various reasons. The 1914--1939 period saw the largest historical increases in high school graduation rates. The laws contributed to this increase: one more year of compulsory schooling increased educational attainment by about 5%. As expected, the laws affected only those at the lower end of the distribution of education. The results also suggest that these laws caused the increases in education rather than being the result of those increases.; Using the 1960, 1970 and 1980 Censuses of the U.S. I select those individuals that were 14 years of age between 1914 and 1939. I then construct synthetic cohorts and follow them over time to calculate their mortality rates. I then match cohorts to the laws that were in place in their state-of-birth when they were 14 years old.; Several Instrumental Variables estimations are presented including an original two-stage procedure for grouped data that can be applied when the first stage can be estimated at the individual level but the second stage can only be estimated at the group level. This estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal and it can be more efficient than the standard two-stage estimator.; The results provide evidence that there is a causal effect of education on mortality, and that this effect is larger than previously estimated.