Potente, C. (2017) British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, 6 - 8 Sept 2017 [ONS LS]

Other information: Education might affect cancer risk and survival through greater access to resources in terms of prevention and cancer treatments. However, only few studies have tried to disentangle the causation from the selection argument concerning the effect of education on cancer incidence and survival. My work has the aim of studying the causal effect of education on cancer incidence and survival in England and Wales. I exploit an exogenous increase in education produced by the compulsory schooling law changes in 1947 and 1972 in England and Wales. This analysis uses these two reforms in order to identify the causal effect of education on cancer risk and survival. The data source is the ONS Longitudinal Study (ONS LS) for England and Wales. ONS LS contains census linked information concerning vital events and cancer for 1% of the population of England and Wales from 1971 to 2011. The identification of the causal effect of education on cancer risk and survival is achieved using the regression discontinuity framework. In the first stage the effect of these reforms on education is found large. Therefore, I estimate the hazard of developing cancer and subsequently the hazard of death given the development of cancer using age and month-year birth cohort fixed effects. Then, I use these month-year birth cohort estimates in local linear regression models as outcome variables to identify the discontinuous changes in the hazards of developing and surviving cancer.

Available online: Link
Output from project: 1007948