TY  - JOUR
AU  - Edwards,Ryan D.
TI  - Health, Income, and the Timing of Education Among Military Retirees
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15778
PY  - 2010
Y2  - February 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15778
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15778.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ryan D. Edwards
Department of Economics
Queens College, CUNY
Powdermaker Hall 300-S
Flushing, NY 11367
Tel: 718/997-5189
Fax: 718/997-5466
E-Mail: redwards@qc.cuny.edu
AB  - There is a large and robust correlation between adult health and education, part of which likely reflects causality running from education into health. Less clear is whether education obtained later in life is as valuable for health as are earlier years of schooling, or whether education raises health directly or through income or wealth. In this paper, I examine how the timing of educational attainment is important for adult health outcomes, income, and wealth, in order to illuminate these issues. Among military retirees, a subpopulation with large variation in the final level and timing of educational attainment, the health returns to a year of education are diminishing in age at acquisition, a pattern that is less pronounced for income and wealth. In the full sample, the marginal effects on the probability of fair or poor health at age 55 of a year of schooling acquired before, during, and after a roughly 25-year military career are –0.025, –0.016, and –0.006, revealing a decline of about half a percentage point each decade. These results suggest that education improves health outcomes more through fostering a lifelong accumulation of healthy behaviors and habits, and less through augmenting the flow of income or the stock of physical wealth.
ER  -