Abstract
This paper examines a schooling expansion in Romania that increased educational attainment for successive cohorts born between 1945 and 1950. We use a difference-in-regression discontinuities (D-RD) design based on school entry cutoff dates to estimate impacts on mortality using 1994-2016 Vital Statistics data, self-reported health in the 2011 Romanian Census, and hospitalizations from 1997-2017 in-patient registers. We find that the schooling reform led to significant increases in years of schooling but did not affect mortality, hospitalizations, or self-reported health. These estimates provide new evidence for the causal effect of education on mortality and health outside of high-income countries and at lower margins of educational attainment.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-48 |
| Number of pages | 48 |
| Journal | Journal of Human Resources |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2021 |
Funding
We would especially like to thank Andreea Balan-Cohen for her work on the schooling reform in Romania in an earlier project. We have benefited from comments by Doug Almond, Robert Kaestner, and Bash Mazumder, as well as participants at the ERMAS 2017, the CHERP conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the NBER Health Economics Spring 2018 program meeting. Andreea Mitrut gratefully acknowledges support from Jan Wallanders and Tom Hedelius Fond. All errors are our own.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
- Strategy and Management
- Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
- Management of Technology and Innovation