Abstract
Studies have found substantial differences in health-related behavior and health care usage between educational groups, which may explain part of the well-documented educational gradient in health. The allocative efficiency hypothesis offers a behavioral explanation for these reported differences. According to this theory, the educated possess more health knowledge and information, allowing them to make better health choices. We perform a mediation analysis to study this mechanism using original survey data from the Philippines, a lower-middle-income country. As an extension of previous empirical research, we construct a comprehensive index that captures different dimensions of health knowledge. Using generalized propensity scores, we find strong support for the allocative efficiency argument. Schooling is significantly associated with health knowledge levels, which explain up to 69% of the education effect on health lifestyle. This corresponds to twice the mediation strength of economic resources, suggesting an important role of this factor in explaining education effects on health decisions.
Highlights
Previous studies have documented considerable inequalities in health between educational groups
While we mainly focus on the estimation of education effects on knowledge and health lifestyle as central outcomes, we provide here a brief overview of the estimation of the individual propensity scores, which are used to efficiently control for respondent’s pre-education characteristics in the subsequent models
This paper provides an empirical test of the allocative efficiency hypothesis, which offers a behavioral explanation for the well-documented educational gradient in health [20]
Summary
Previous studies have documented considerable inequalities in health between educational groups. One behaviorally based explanation for Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-017-0950-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users In line with this argument, previous studies have found education to positively influence health-related lifestyles and behaviors, such as smoking [36, 38, 40, 64], drinking [36], or care seeking [53, 56]. Despite this evidence, little is known about the actual mechanisms through which education affects behavioral patterns. The evidence suggests that other mechanisms, such as differences in productive efficiency or omitted third factors, might drive the effects
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