|
Abstract
The Health Returns to Education Policies: From Preschool to High School and Beyond
This research project examines the long-term productivity of education spending, with emphasis on the health returns of educational investments throughout the life course. The project aims to uncover the relationships between segregation, school spending, educational attainment, and students' short-and long-run health outcomes and identify the causal chain that links measures of school quality and adult health. The three major policy changes this research exploits to identify significant changes in school spending include desegregation, school finance reform, and Head Start, for cohorts born since 1950. The health returns to educational investments have received less attention than the traditional focus on short-run test scores and more recently, labor market returns. This is an important omission, given that the return to education in terms of health is about half of the return to education on earnings (Cutler and Lleras-Muney, 2008; Johnson, 2011). An aim of this project is to uniquely fill the research gap by linking data on early childhood education through K-12 school resource inputs with data on adult health and SES attainment outcomes. This work aims to improve our understanding of the long-run economic and health returns to access to high- vs low-quality K-12 school systems.
I use nationally-representative data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) spanning 1968-2013—and match them to administrative data about Head Start budgets and K-12 school expenditures. The study will analyze the life trajectories of children born since 1950, and followed into adulthood through 2013, using the PSID and its supplements on both age of onset of specific health conditions and early childhood education. We use the timing of court-ordered school desegregation and the passage of court-mandated school finance reforms, and their associated type of funding formula change, as exogenous shifters of school spending and we compare the adult health and SES outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to these education policy reforms, depending on place and year of birth. This project will emphasize potential interactive effects between improved access to school quality and health care services on children’s long-run socioeconomic and health outcomes. The evidence from this project will highlight the importance of viewing education policy as health policy, for indeed some of our most productive investments to improve long-run health in adulthood are in the form of childhood educational investments. Analyses that do not consider potential long-term health effects may understate the social return to education investments. And, similarly, early-life health investments can have far-reaching impacts on subsequent educational and economic attainments. The results contribute to our understanding of how segregation influences childhood SES conditions and leads to racial health disparities in adulthood.
Bio
Rucker C. Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Johnson is a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and the National Poverty Center. As a labor and health economist, his work considers the role of poverty and inequality in affecting life chances. He has focused on such topics as the long-run impacts of school quality on educational attainment and socioeconomic success, including the effects of desegregation, school resources, and Head Start. He has investigated the determinants of intergenerational mobility; the societal consequences of incarceration; effects of maternal employment patterns on child well-being; and the socioeconomic determinants of health disparities over the life course, including the roles of childhood neighborhood conditions and residential segregation.
Share this event:   
|
