Can Your Neighbour’s Education Affect Your Health?

Abstract

Most studies pertaining to the returns to education literature focus on estimating benefits of education that accrue to the individual who spends more years in school. However, from a public policy perspective it is crucial to understand the gains of education to the society at large. This study is an attempt to estimate these social returns to education, that is, the impact of an increase in average education on individual health outcomes. In particular, we try to assess if (above and beyond individual educational attainment), average years of schooling at a district level has an impact on individual health. We obtain individual level data from two rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) and calculate district level average education using data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) surveys for the same years. We use a logit model to estimate the probability of suffering from short-term morbidity and find that there is a strong negative association between short-term morbidity and average education. We also study the impact of average education on health seeking outcomes such as consumption of cigarettes and tobacco. We find that after accounting for individual education and income, the average education at the district level has a strong positive influence on better health seeking behaviour. The results from our study lend support to the notion that in addition to policies aimed at improving healthcare, an increase in average education can potentially lead to improvement in health outcomes.