I investigate the causal effect of education on time preferences. To deal with the endogeneity of education, I exploit exogenous variation in education imposed by a Turkish school reform that raised compulsory education from five to eight years. I find that education causes individuals to make more patient inter-temporal choices but does not induce them to report being more patient. I also provide evidence that the effect of education on patient inter-temporal choices does not operate through changes in financial well-being.

The government of Peru amended its constitution to increase compulsory education from six to 11 years in 1993. This constitutional amendment provides a natural experiment to investigate the impact of maternal education on child mortality. Exploiting differences in the reform exposure by age, I find that mothers who were exposed to the reform were less likely to experience the death of a child. There is also evidence that the reform caused a decline in infant mortality. These results are not driven by the age difference between mothers who were treated by the reform and those who were not treated. Additional analyses reveal that the reform increased age at first birth, decreased desired fertility, reduced smoking, and improved economic opportunities for women. The results demonstrate that compulsory schooling may be a useful policy tool to improve women\'s education, which can, in turn, enhance the survival of their children.

Most low- and middle-income countries have implemented mass education reforms in the last few decades. Demographers and policymakers have posited that mass schooling would enhance women\'s autonomy and, therefore, accelerate population transformations in the Global South. However, gains in women\'s schooling may have unexpected implications for female autonomy in contexts where hypergamy norms-the ideal that men should marry down and women should marry up in education and other markers of status-are still dominant. This study addresses difficulties in evaluating the causal impact of additional education on women\'s autonomy by leveraging the timing of compulsory schooling reforms in three Latin American countries: Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. Using Demographic and Health Surveys, I implement an instrumental variable design using random exposure to compulsory schooling laws as an instrument for years of education. Results show that for women who entered the school system as a result of compulsory reforms, further schooling decreased their level of autonomy in all countries-especially among women from rural Bolivia and Peru. Additional analyses suggest these results are explained by changes in the selection into schooling and the formation of unions defying hypergamy norms. Together, these findings highlight the importance of examining the returns to mass schooling considering population heterogeneity and the contextual meaning of women\'s education.

Both the industrialization thesis and institutional theories of education hypothesize that early educational expansion increased internal migration. We take advantage of state variation in early U.S. compulsory schooling laws and use a regression discontinuity approach to test this hypothesis in 1860-1950 Census data. Results indicate that those required to attend school were more likely to leave their state of birth than others. Effects were stronger among men in states with low occupational status scores, suggesting education encouraged migration out of states with fewer occupational opportunities. Potential contemporary implications for the U.S. and developing countries are discussed.

Intervening on modifiable risk factors to prevent dementia is of key importance, since progress-modifying treatments are not currently available. Education is inversely associated with dementia risk, but causality and mechanistic pathways remain unclear. We aimed to examine the causality of this relationship in Sweden using, as a natural experiment, data on a compulsory schooling reform that extended primary education by 1 year for 70% of the population between 1936 and 1949. The reform introduced substantial exogenous variation in education that was unrelated to pupils\' characteristics. We followed 18 birth cohorts (n = 1,341,842) from 1985 to 2016 (up to ages 79-96 years) for a dementia diagnosis in the National Inpatient and Cause of Death registers and fitted Cox survival models with stratified baseline hazards at the school-district level, chronological age as the time scale, and cohort indicators. Analyses indicated very small or negligible causal effects of education on dementia risk (main hazard ratio = 1.01, 95% confidence interval: 0.98, 1.04). Multiple sensitivity checks considering only compliers, the pre-/post- design, differences in health-care-seeking behavior, and the impact of exposure misclassification left the results essentially unaltered. The reform had limited effects on further adult socioeconomic outcomes, such as income. Our findings suggest that without mediation through adult socioeconomic position, education cannot be uncritically considered a modifiable risk factor for dementia.

While less-educated women are more likely to give birth as teenagers, there is scant evidence the relationship is causal. We investigate this possibility using variation in compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) to identify the impact of formal education on teen fertility at specific ages for a large sample of women drawn from multiple waves of the Canadian Census. We find large negative impacts of education on births for young women aged seventeen and eighteen, but less systematic evidence of an effect after these ages. While our findings are consistent with an \"incarceration effect\", where school enrollment deters fertility in a contemporaneous manner, we cannot rule out longer-run effects of education on fertility.

Although the impact of education on health is important for public policy everywhere, the overwhelming majority of research identifying the health returns to education has focused on developed countries. We use data from multiple waves of nationally-representative Health and Tobacco Surveys in Turkey, and exploit an education reform that increased the mandatory years of schooling from 5 to 8 years in 1997. Using exposure to the reform as an instrument for completing at least eight years of schooling, we examine the impact of education on health indicators and smoking among young adults. We find that extending schooling on this margin impacts men and women differently. Our results indicate that while a one-year of extra schooling increases the likelihood of being obese among males by 9.9 percentage points, the same increase in schooling improves the probability of women being in the healthy weight range by 15.5 percentage points. Consistent with this result, an extra year of education increases women\'s propensity to self-evaluate their health as excellent by 4.3 percentage points. Additional analyses reveal that education makes men (but not women) more likely to spend time on computers, using the internet, and to spend time on social media, suggesting that differential time allocation between men and women, triggered by enhanced education, may be a mechanism behind the differential results between the sexes. Education has no impact on smoking for men or women regardless of the measure of smoking.

Educational attainment is a key factor for understanding why some individuals migrate and others do not. Compulsory schooling laws, which determine an individual\'s minimum level of education, can potentially affect migration. We test whether and how increasing the length of compulsory schooling influences migration of affected cohorts across European countries, a context where labor mobility is essentially free. We construct a novel database that includes information for 31 European countries on compulsory education reforms passed between 1950 and 1990. Combining this data with information on recent migration flows by cohorts, we find that an additional year of compulsory education reduces the number of individuals from affected cohorts who migrate in a given year by 9 %. Our results rely on the exogeneity of compulsory schooling laws. A variety of empirical tests indicate that European legislators did not pass compulsory education reforms as a reaction to changes in emigration rates or educational attainment.

The present study explores the discursive positioning of children in research articles on mental-health-promoting interventions. The questions under investigation are: are children positioned as active or passive agents, are children\'s health and wellbeing contextualised, and if so how? How is the child perceived; that is, how are age, gender, socioeconomic status, family structure, dis/ability, and so on accounted for? We found that the positioning of the child as passive and formed by adults prevails; health is largely individualised and decontextualised in that it is depicted as being contingent on the person\'s own capabilities. However, there are instances in which children are positioned as active subjects, their opinions are in focus, and their health and wellbeing are connected to social relations and context. We propose a more active discussion about how children and wellbeing are conceptualised in the outlining, implementation and research of public health interventions. Moreover, children--just like adults--should be increasingly regarded as service users who are entitled to have a say in matters that concern them.

We investigate if there is a causal link between education and health knowledge using data from the 1984/85 and 1991/92 waves of the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS). Uniquely, the survey asks respondents what they think are the main causes of ten common health conditions, and we compare these answers to those given by medical professionals to form an index of health knowledge. For causal identification we use increases in the UK minimum school leaving age in 1947 (from 14 to 15) and 1972 (from 15 to 16) to provide exogenous variation in education. These reforms predominantly induced adolescents who would have left school to stay for one additionally mandated year. OLS estimates suggest that education significantly increases health knowledge, with a one-year increase in schooling increasing the health knowledge index by 15% of a standard deviation. In contrast, estimates from instrumental-variable models show that increased schooling due to the education reforms did not significantly affect health knowledge. This main result is robust to numerous specification tests and alternative formulations of the health knowledge index. Further research is required to determine whether there is also no causal link between higher levels of education - such as post-school qualifications - and health knowledge.