This paper reviews the evidence on the well-known positive association between socioeconomic status and health. We focus on four dimensions of socioeconomic status -- education, financial resources, rank, and race and ethnicity -- paying particular attention to how the mechanisms linking health...

Education and income are strong predictors of health and longevity. In the last 20 years many efforts have been made to understand if these relationships are causal and what the possible role of policy should be as a result. The evidence from various studies is ambiguous: the effects of...

There is a large and persistent association between education and health. In this paper, we review what is known about this link. We first document the facts about the relationship between education and health. The education 'gradient' is found for both health behaviors and health status, though...

Mortality rates have fallen dramatically over time, starting in a few countries in the 18th century, and continuing to fall today. In just the past century, life expectancy has increased by over 30 years. At the same time, mortality rates remain much higher in poor countries, with a difference...

This paper documents a counter-cyclical pattern in the health of children, and examines whether this pattern is due to selection of mothers choosing to give birth or due to behavioral changes. We study the relationship between the unemployment rate at the time of a baby's conception and parental...

Recent studies suggest that health inequalities across socio-economic groups in the US are large and have been growing. We hypothesize that, as in other, non-health contexts, this pattern occurs because more educated people are better able than to take advantage of technological advances in...

Females live longer than males in most parts of the world today. Among OECD nations in recent years, the difference in life expectancy at birth is around four to six years (seven in Japan). But have women always lived so much longer than men? The answer is that they have not. We ask when and why...

Education is strongly associated with better health and longer lives. However, the extent to which education causes health and longevity is widely debated. We develop a human capital framework to structure the interpretation of the empirical evidence. We then review evidence on the causal...

We document the correlations between early childhood health (as proxied by height) and educational attainment and investigate the labor market and wealth returns to height for United States cohorts born between 1820 and 1990. The nineteenth century was characterized by low investments in height...

While there is substantial research on the intergenerational persistence of economic outcomes such as income and wealth, much less is known about intergenerational persistence in health. We examine the correlation in longevity (an overall measure of health) across generations using a unique...