Education , Cognition and Health : Evidence from a Social Experiment

In this paper we examine how an education policy intervention the introduction of a comprehensive school in Sweden that increased the number of compulsory years of schooling affected cognitive and non-cognitive skills and long-term health. We use detailed administrative data combined with survey information to create a data set with background information, child ability and long-term adult outcomes. We show that the education reform results in significant gains in skills among children, but the effects on long-term health are overall negligible. We also demonstrate that the reform had heterogeneous effects across families with different socio-economic backgrounds and initial skill endowments, with significant improvements in cognition and skills for lower SES and lower ability people. JEL codes: I12, I14, I18, I21 * We are grateful for comments from Douglas Almond, Anne Case, Meltem Daisal, Angus Deaton, Sergei Koulayev, Ilona Koupil, Amanda Kowalski, Ilyana Kuziemko, Adriana Lleras-Muney, Bentley McLeod, Doug Miller, Sendhil Mullainathan, Torsten Persson, Diane Schanzenbach and Kosali Simon as well as from participants in seminars at Tufts University, Princeton University, the University of New Hampshire, Case Western Reserve University, SOFI, CHESS and the IIES at Stockholm University, the 2011 Nordic Summer Institute in Labor Economics at the Faroe Islands, the NBER Summer Institute, the NBER Cohort Studies meetings 2012, the 2012 CeMENT meetings in Chicago, SOLE 2012 and the 2011 IHEA conference in Toronto. Financial support from the IFAU is gratefully acknowledged. Costas Meghir thanks the ISPSS and the Cowles foundation for financial assistance. The usual disclaimer applies. 1 Department of Economics, Yale University Box 208264 New Haven, CT 06520-8264, USA; IFS and ESRC. Email: [email protected]. 2 Department of Economics, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]. 3 Corresponding author; Johns Hopkins University, 100 International Drive, Baltimore, MD 21202 email: [email protected].