Education and adult health: Is there a causal effect?

Many studies find a strong positive correlation between education and adult health. A subtler question is whether this correlation can be interpreted as a causal relationship. We combine multi-country data from two cross-sections of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey and use exogenous variation in compulsory years of schooling across countries and cohorts induced by compulsory schooling laws. We find no causal effect of education on any of our several health measures. This finding is extremely robust to different changes in our main specification and holds using other databases. We discuss different explanations for our results.Financial support from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Feder (ECO2014-57413,ECO2015-65820-P, ECO2017-83069-P), Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (programa estatal de promoción del talento y su empleabilidad en I+D+i, subprograma estatal de movilidad, plan estatal de investigación científica y técnica y de innovación 2013-16), Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo/2019/037) and Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas (IVIE) is gratefully acknowledged