Does Education Have the Same Effect on Mortality of Blacks and Whites across Age?

Anna Zajacova, Princeton University

A substantial body of research has documented the inverse relationship between education and mortality. Most existing studies control on race, in effect constraining the influence of education to be the same for both races. In this paper, I relax this constraint and examine whether education has the same effect on mortality for blacks and whites. I analyzed panel survey of 14,000 respondents from four NHANES survey waves spanning 20 years, using discrete time logit models to incorporate time-varying variables and to model our primary coefficient of interest, education by race interaction. The gross effect of education was significantly stronger for whites than for blacks. The difference was explained by income and other sociodemographic variables, suggesting that it was due to lower returns to education in income for blacks. I also found that the effect of schooling attenuates with age, and the trend doesn’t differ significantly by race.