TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cutler,David M.
AU  - Lange,Fabian
AU  - Meara,Ellen
AU  - Richards,Seth
AU  - Ruhm,Christopher J.
TI  - Explaining the Rise in Educational Gradients in Mortality
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15678
PY  - 2010
Y2  - January 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15678
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15678.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David M. Cutler
Department of Economics
Harvard University
1875 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/496-5216
Fax: 617/496-8951
E-Mail: dcutler@harvard.edu

Fabian Lange
McGill University
Department of Economics
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T7
E-Mail: fabolange@gmail.com

Ellen Meara
Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy
and Clinical Practice
35 Centerra Parkway
Lebanon, NH 03755
Tel: 603/653-0899
E-Mail: ellen.r.meara@dartmouth.edu

Seth Richards-Shubik
H.John Heinz III College
School of Public Policy and Management
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Tel: 412/268-4693
E-Mail: sethrs@andrew.cmu.edu

Christopher J. Ruhm
Frank Batten School of
Leadership and Public Policy
University of Virginia
235 McCormick Rd.
P.O. Box 400893
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4893
Tel: 434-243-3729
E-Mail: ruhm@virginia.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2010-06-01
AB  - The long-standing inverse relationship between education and mortality strengthened substantially later in the 20th century.  This paper examines the reasons for this increase.  We show that behavioral risk factors are not of primary importance.  Smoking has declined more for the better educated, but not enough to explain the trend.  Obesity has risen at similar rates across education groups, and control of blood pressure and cholesterol has increased fairly uniformly as well.  Rather, our results show that the mortality returns to risk factors, and conditional on risk factors, the return to education, have grown over time.
ER  -