The Effect of Education on Mortality and Health: Evidence from a Schooling Expansion in Romania

This paper examines a schooling expansion in Romania that increased educational attainment for successive cohorts born between 1945 and 1950. We use a difference-in-regression discontinuities (D-RD) design based on school entry cutoff dates to estimate impacts on mortality using 1994-2016 Vital Statistics data, self-reported health in the 2011 Romanian Census, and hospitalizations from 1997-2017 in-patient registers. We find that the schooling reform led to significant increases in years of schooling but did not affect mortality, hospitalizations, or self-reported health. These estimates provide new evidence for the causal effect of education on mortality and health outside of high-income countries and at lower margins of educational attainment.