Effects of quantity of education on health: A regression discontinuity design approach based on the Chinese Cultural Revolution

•There was a negative educational shock caused by the Chinese Cultural Revolution.•We apply a RD method to identify the causal effects of education on health.•We find mixed effects of education on health.

In this paper, we exploit the negative educational shock caused by the Chinese Cultural Revolution to apply a regression discontinuity method in identifying the causal effects of education on health. While we find that better education reduces the probability of having poor self-assessed health and disabilities, we do not find statistically significant effects of education on the probability of having poor physical functioning status or uncomfortable body pains in the previous four weeks. Moreover, we find an interesting result that better education increases the probability of having chronic diseases. While most existing studies only identify the effect of education at a particular level, one contribution of our paper is that it provides estimates much closer to the population average effect. Moreover, our results imply that the underlying mechanism behind the effect of education on health might be different in developing countries from that in developed countries.