Refining the Association Among Race, Education and Health

Abstract

Education holds a complex, multifaceted association with health. In efforts to flesh out this relationship's nuances, researchers have found that how these two factors relate is dependent upon different social characteristics. In efforts to explain the appearance of this cross-group variation, sociologist have begun to develop the theoretical framework of resource substitution. This paper seeks to add to the development of the resource substitution framework by first examining if the magnitude of health returns to additional education varies between non-Hispanic black Americans and non-Hispanic white Americans, after accounting for other measures of socioeconomic status, and then determining if said variation can adequately be described by resource substitution. Using the 2009 PSID, I find evidence to suggest that, conditioned on other socioeconomic factors, the magnitude of the health benefit from increased education does vary between blacks and whites, and that resource substitution does not hold in this scenario.