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Education and Self-Reported Health: Evidence from 23 Countries on the Role of Years of Schooling, Cognitive Skills and Social Capital.
- Source :
- PLoS ONE; 2/22/2016, Vol. 11 Issue 2, p1-16, 16p
- Publication Year :
- 2016
-
Abstract
- We examine the contribution of human capital to health in 23 countries worldwide using the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, a unique large-scale international assessment of 16–65 year olds that contains information about self-reported health, schooling, cognitive skills and indicators of interpersonal trust, which represents the cognitive dimension of social capital. We identify cross-national differences in education, skill and social capital gradients in self-reported health and explore the interaction between human capital and social capital to examine if and where social capital is a mediator or a moderator of years of schooling and cognitive abilities. We find large education gaps in self-reported health across all countries in our sample and a strong positive relationship between self-reported health and both literacy and trust in the majority of countries. Education and skill gradients in self-reported health appear to be largest in the United States and smallest in Italy, France, Sweden and Finland. On average around 5.5% of both the schooling gap in self-reported health and the literacy gap in self-reported health can be explained by the higher levels of interpersonal trust that better educated/more skilled individuals have, although the mediating role of trust varies considerably across countries. We find no evidence of a moderation effect: the relationships between health and years of schooling and health and cognitive skills are similar among individuals with different levels of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- MEDICAL education
COGNITIVE ability
SELF-evaluation
SOCIAL capital
HEALTH surveys
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 11
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- PLoS ONE
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 113218496
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149716