Educational gains in cause-specific mortality: Accounting for cognitive ability and family-level confounders using propensity score weighting

Social Science & Medicine
Govert E BijwaardFinn Rasmussen

Abstract

A negative educational gradient has been found for many causes of death. This association may be partly explained by confounding factors that affect both educational attainment and mortality. We correct the cause-specific educational gradient for observed individual background and unobserved family factors using an innovative method based on months lost due to a specific cause of death re-weighted by the probability of attaining a higher educational level. We use data on men with brothers from the Swedish Military Conscription Registry (1951-1983), linked to administrative registers. This dataset of some 700,000 men allows us to distinguish between five education levels and many causes of death. The empirical results reveal that raising the educational level from primary to tertiary would result in an additional 20 months of survival between ages 18 and 63. This improvement in mortality is mainly attributable to fewer deaths from external causes. The highly educated gain more than nine months due to the reduction in deaths from external causes, but gain only two months due to the reduction in cancer mortality and four months due to the reduction in cardiovascular mortality. Ignoring confounding would lead to an underestimation ...Continue Reading

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Citations

Aug 11, 2018·Population Studies·Govert E BijwaardMikko Myrskylä
Oct 17, 2019·International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health·Viera IvankováMartin Rigelský
Aug 10, 2021·Annual Review of Sociology·Iliya Gutin, Robert A Hummer

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