Personality, Education, and Health-Related Outcomes

We estimate effects of five latent childhood personality skills and higher education on determinants of longevity, including general and mental health, health behaviors, lifestyles, and lifetime earnings. The latent personality skills are closely related to the well-established contemporary taxonomy of personality called the Big Five (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).  We employ the Terman panel data of high ability individuals (1922-1991), uniquely suited to studying the developmental origins of health and longevity. Among other variables, we have access to childhood IQ and personality ratings, multiple infant and childhood health measures, parental and private tutoring in childhood, as well as parental education, employment, and wealth.  Over the lifecycle we observe health, medical treatments, mortality, health behaviors such as heavy drinking and unhealthy diet, lifestyles such as marriage status and the degree of socialization, and earnings.  We uncover the mechanisms behind strong treatment effects of personality and college education on longevity discovered by Savelyev (2013) and identify the causal effect of education on health-related outcomes using the conditional independence assumption as in (Heckman, Stixrud and Urzua, 2006).  We control for detailed and relevant background characteristics, childhood IQ, and the five latent personality skills.  We account for measurement error in the proxies of personality skills via factor-analytic methods, and control for multiple hypotheses using a new version of the Holm-Bonferroni method (Romano and Wolf, 2005).  We find strong effects of personality skills and education on health and health-related outcomes.  The effects of education and the five personality skills differ by gender and outcome demonstrating substantial heterogeneity in the role of multiple human skills in generating health.  While all five personality skills matter for health outcomes, perhaps the most important skill is Conscientiousness, which together with education has an essential protective role for health.