Room: Phillips 203
Time: Mon 13:15 PM-14:45 PM

Understanding Educational and Racial Differences in Health

Chair: Richard Hirth (University of Michigan)

Session Description

This session will feature three papers that aim to deepen the understanding of racial and educational differences in health outcomes, two issues that are central to health economics and health policy research. The first paper is by David Cutler, Fabian Lange, Ellen Meara, Seth Richards, and Christopher Ruhm. Recent decades have seen an increase in the magnitude of the relationship between schooling and mortality. This paper aims to explain whether changes in the relationship between schooling and health behaviors can explain this trend. The other two papers represent exciting new areas of inquiry by investigating the effects of school quality on health outcomes. The second paper, by Rucker Johnson, investigates the effects of school quality on health using variation in school quality for blacks that emerged out of school desegregation for cohorts born between 1950-1975. He uses PSID data linked to information on school quality and neighborhood characteristics to estimate the effects of school quality on health in later life. The third paper, by David Frisvold and Ezra Golberstein, uses within-state and over-time variation in black-white differences in school quality in segregated southern states to identify the effect of racial school quality differences on racial health differences. This paper uses data from the National Health Interview Surveys to estimate the effects school quality on health differences for southern-born cohorts born between 1910-1950.

Session Organizer: Ezra Golberstein (Harvard Medical School)

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Presentations

1. Explaining the Rise in Educational Gradients in Mortality

   Presenter: Ellen Meara (Harvard Medical School)

   Discussant: David Frisvold (Emory University)

2. Race differentials in employment effects of psychological distress

   Presenter: Pierre Alexandre (Johns Hopkins University)

   Discussant: Christopher Roebuck (Caremark)

3. The Effect of School Quality on Black-White Health Differences: Evidence from Segregated Southern Schools

   Presenter: Ezra Golberstein (Harvard Medical School)

   Discussant: Elizabeth Ty Wilde (Columbia University)