NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES EDUCATION, COGNITION AND HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT Costas Meghir

In this paper we examine how an education policy intervention the introduction of a comprehensive school in Sweden that increased the number of compulsory years of schooling, affected cognitive and non-cognitive skills and long-term health. We use detailed administrative data combined with survey information to create a data set with background information, child ability and long-term adult outcomes. We show that extra education results in significant gains in skills among children, but the effects on long-term health are overall negligible. However, we demonstrate that the schooling reform had heterogeneous effects across family socio-economic backgrounds and initial skill endowments, with significant improvements in cognition and skills for lower Socio-economic status individuals and lower ability people. Costas Meghir Department of Economics Yale University 37 Hillhouse Avenue New Haven, CT 06511 and IZA and also NBER [email protected] Mårten Palme Department of Economics Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm SWEDEN and IZA [email protected] Emilia Simeonova Department of Economics Princeton University 355 Wallace Hall Princeton, NJ 08540 and NBER [email protected]