Yet Another Brick in the Wall - Investigating whether education is causally related to dementia

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the relationship between education and risk of developing dementia. From a large body of literature, it is well known that higher education associates with better health. This is true both for health in general, but also for more specific diseases like Alzheimer’s. However, the question of whether the link between years of education and dementia is causal or not, remains unclear. While a possible explanation to the noted association between education and dementia is that there is causal link between years of schooling and dementia, and that education serves as a protective and compensating mechanism, such association could also follow from that people with larger brain volume are more likely to take on more education, while also having more physical resources that enable them to compensate for the underlying pathology of dementia. Using an instrumental variable (IV) approach, where changes in compulsory school leaving ages across countries is used as a proxy for education, this research attempts to address the problem of endogeneity. The paper uses individual, cross-sectional data from The Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), covering respondents from 21 European countries which undergone changes in compulsory schooling between the 1930’s and 1970’s. The results suggest that education cannot significantly predict the risk of developing dementia or adult cognitive ability, when using compulsory schooling reforms as an instrument for educational attainment. These results contradict most of the work that has been completed in this field of research.