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The education-health gradient: Revisiting the role of socio-emotional skills

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  • Gensowski, Miriam
  • Gørtz, Mette

Abstract

Is the education-health gradient inflated because both education and health are associated with unobserved socio-emotional skills? We find that the gradient in health behaviors and outcomes is reduced by about 15 to 50% from accounting for fine-grained personality facets and up to another 50% from Locus of Control. Traditional aggregated Big-Five scales, however, have a much smaller contribution to the gradient. We use sibling-fixed effects to net out the contribution from genes and shared childhood environment, decomposing the gradient into its components with an order-invariant method. We rely on a large survey (N = 28,261) linked to high-quality Danish administrative registers with information on parental background and objectively measured diagnoses and care use. Accounting for Locus of Control yields the strongest gradient reduction in self-rated health status and objective diagnoses (30%–50%), and in health behaviors the most important factor is Extraversion, a skill that has been shown to be malleable in interventions.

Suggested Citation

  • Gensowski, Miriam & Gørtz, Mette, 2024. "The education-health gradient: Revisiting the role of socio-emotional skills," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:97:y:2024:i:c:s0167629624000560
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2024.102911
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    2. Wolfgang Frimmel & Felix Glaser, 2024. "Socio-Economic Inequality in Mortality and Healthcare Utilization: Evidence from Cancer Patients," Economics working papers 2024-14, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    3. Mette Goertz & Ida Lykke Kristiansen & Tianyi Wang, 2024. "The Power of Daughters: How Physicians Family Influences Female Patients Health," CEBI working paper series 24-18, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inequality; Health-education gradient; Personality; Big Five-2 inventory; Sibling fixed effects;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being

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