Spillover effects of children’s education on parents’ health and longevity
Christiaan Monden, University of Oxford
Parents of better-educated children are healthier and live longer. Is this a nonmonetary return to education which crosses generational boundaries, or is this the consequence of unobserved factors (e.g. shared genes or living conditions) driving both children’s education and parental health? Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) and two educational reforms that raised the mandatory school-leaving age from age 14 to 15 years in 1947 and from age 15 to 16 years in 1972, we investigate the causal effect of children’s education on parental longevity. Results suggest that both one-year increases in school-leaving age significantly reduced the hazard of dying for fathers as well as for mothers. We do not find a consistent pattern when comparing differences in the effects of daughters’ and sons’ education. Lower-class parents benefitted more from the 1972 reform than higher-class parents. We discuss these results against the backdrop of generational conflict and the specific English context.
Christiaan Monden is a quantitative empirical sociologist interested in social inequalities in health, mortality and (socioeconomic) well-being, and in particular how such inequalities are related to life course transitions and family processes. His interests also include marriage and divorce, twin fertility, and family size. He is Professor of Sociology & Demography and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. He obtained his MSC and PhD in Sociology at Utrecht University and the University of Nijmegen / ICS Graduate School in the Netherlands.