Education, Health and Health-Related Behaviors: Evidence from Higher Education Expansion

This study throws light on the potential non-linear effects of education on individual health and health-related behaviors, finding a strong role for higher education. Using an instrumental variables (IVs) strategy, which leverages changes in within-province between-municipality college proximity across birth cohorts, we demonstrate that higher education affects individual health-related behavior. By contrast, IVs estimates based on a compulsory schooling age reform show mostly non-significant effects. Our results point to a complex link between education and health. On the one hand, higher education channels individuals into some healthy behaviors and better health outcomes namely healthy eating, more physical activity and a lower risk of obesity. On the other hand, it also appears to increase the prevalence of certain unhealthy behaviors, such as greater smoking and drinking prevalence and higher cigarettes consumption. Albeit effects are generally similar across genders, except in few cases (e.g. smoking behavior), our analysis highlights heterogeneous effects by age and helps explain potential differences in results reported in past quasi-experimental studies in which the cohorts affected by the educational reforms used for identification are observed at given ages and not over an individual’s entire lifecycle

Health Effects of Risky Lifestyles and Adverse Working Conditions: Are Older Individuals More Penalized?

Using unusually rich panel data from Denmark, we investigate differences by age in the health implications of risky lifestyles and adverse working conditions. Accounting for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, overall, we find no health penalties for older workers (55 and over) compared to younger ones (18\u201334; 35\u201354). However, the former suffer more from the health consequences of risky lifestyles\u2014especially the lack of consumption of fruit and vegetables and physical inactivity. Working conditions negatively relate with health, but fewer differences across age groups exist. Selection bias, namely the healthy worker effect, does not alter our results

Temporary Employment, Job Mobility and Wage Growth in Italy

This paper analyses the differential in annual wage growth between temporary and permanent workers in Italy, separately for stayers (wage growth within the same workplace) and movers (between jobs via job mobility). To this purpose, we use the 1995-2001 Italian component of the ECHP (European Community Household Panel). Given the potential endogeneity of the contract type on wage dynamics, our estimates are based on a fixed effects specification. The results for the movers indicate that wage growth of temporary workers is lower than that of permanent mployees; by converse, the two groups share similar rates of on-the-job wage growth, i.e. growth among the stayers. The results also show that both the duration of the temporary contract and the age of the worker matter: the wage growth is lower among young employees with temporary contracts, especially if they change workplace in the year of observation

La distribuzione dei salari in Italia: un confronto tra pubblico e privato

This paper contributes to the literature on public sector wage premium presenting least squares and quantile regression estimates of the public-private wage differential in Italy. Using data from the Bank of Italy\u2019s SHIW for 1998, we find that the public sector pays more on average, and that the returns to various human capital characteristics are different in the two sectors. The public sector wage premium is larger for male workers with low levels of education and for female, especially with higher level of education. The quantile regression results suggest that the gap is more favourable for those on the left tail of the wage distribution. Furthermore, the return to education increases monotonically over the distribution in both sectors, and it is higher in the public sector starting from the median quantile, while the return of experience shows a decrease over quantiles and is constantly higher in the private sector

The Wage Return to Graduate in Italian Small-town Universities

In this paper we use a representative sample drawn from the `Indagine Statistica sull\u2019 Inserimento Professionale dei Laureati\u2019 by the Italian National Statistical Institute and data from the Italian Ministry of Education to look at the wage premium of graduates from a regional university (i.e. not located in a metropolitan area) relative to graduates from a non-regional university, three years after graduation. Our results show that, after accounting for observed characteristics of individuals and universities, a wage premium is associated with a degree from a regional university. This finding may be interpreted as showing that regional universities enhance the local human capital stock or create specifi c skills needed by the local economic environment