The causal relationship between education, health and health related behaviour: evidence from a natural experiment in England

Summary

 I exploit exogenous variation in the likelihood to obtain any sort of educational qualification between
January- and February-born individuals for 13 academic cohorts in England. For these cohorts compulsory
schooling laws interacted with the timing of the CSE and O-level exams to change the probability of
obtaining a qualification by around 2–3 percentage points. I then use data on individuals born in these
two months from the British Labour Force Survey and the Health Survey for England to investigate the
effects of education on health using being February-born as an instrument for education. The results
indicate neither an effect of education on various health related measures nor an effect on health related
behaviour, e.g., smoking, drinking or eating various types of food.