ROCKWOOL Foundation, Research Unit, Denmark; IZA, Germany.
IZA, Germany; University of Copenhagen, Department of Economics, Denmark; Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI), Denmark.
J Health Econ. 2024 Sep;97:102911. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2024.102911. Epub 2024 Jun 19.
Is the education-health gradient inflated because both education and health are associated with unobserved socio-emotional skills? We find that the gradient in health behaviors and outcomes is reduced by about 15 to 50% from accounting for fine-grained personality facets and up to another 50% from Locus of Control. Traditional aggregated Big-Five scales, however, have a much smaller contribution to the gradient. We use sibling-fixed effects to net out the contribution from genes and shared childhood environment, decomposing the gradient into its components with an order-invariant method. We rely on a large survey (N = 28,261) linked to high-quality Danish administrative registers with information on parental background and objectively measured diagnoses and care use. Accounting for Locus of Control yields the strongest gradient reduction in self-rated health status and objective diagnoses (30%-50%), and in health behaviors the most important factor is Extraversion, a skill that has been shown to be malleable in interventions.
教育-健康梯度是否被夸大了，因为教育和健康都与未被观察到的社会情感技能有关？我们发现，在考虑到细微的人格特征后，健康行为和结果的梯度降低了 15%至 50%，而从控制源的角度来看，梯度又降低了 50%。然而，传统的综合大五量表对梯度的贡献要小得多。我们使用兄弟姐妹固定效应来消除基因和共同的童年环境的贡献，并用一种不变序的方法将梯度分解成其组成部分。我们依赖于一项大型调查（N=28261），该调查与丹麦高质量的行政登记处相联系，这些登记处提供了有关父母背景和客观测量的诊断和护理使用的信息。控制源的解释产生了自评健康状况和客观诊断（30%-50%）中最强的梯度降低，而在健康行为中，最重要的因素是外向性，干预已经证明这种技能是可塑的。
