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The Impact of College Education on Old-Age Mortality: A Study of Marginal Treatment Effects

January 2017

Written by: Evan Taylor

Working Paper Number:

CES-17-30

Abstract

Using a newly constructed dataset that links 2000 U.S. Census long-form records to Social Security Administration data files, I evaluate the effect of college education on mortality. In an OLS regression, women and men who have at least some college education have 20% lower mortality rates than those with a high school degree or less. I proceed with an empirical design intended to illuminate the extent to which this relationship is causal, estimating marginal treatment effects (MTEs) using the proximity of the nearest college to individuals' birthplace as an instrument. Results indicate positive selection into college education (in terms of longevity) for both women and men. Selection drives almost all of the mortality gap for women. For men, longevity gains from college attendance are concentrated among individuals with unobserved variables that make them unlikely attend college. This suggests that men who would benefit most from receiving college education in terms of mortality reductions are those who are not attending.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

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:
econometric, population, educated, education, college, generation, graduate, schooling, poorer, mortality, cohort

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

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:
Social Security Administration, Ordinary Least Squares, Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1990 Census, Social Security, Geographic Information Systems, Protected Identification Key, National Center for Health Statistics, NUMIDENT, University of Michigan

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