Personality and the education-health gradient: a note on "understanding differences in health behaviors by education"

Abstract

We test the robustness of the results of Cutler and Lleras-Muney (2010) on the role of personality in explaining the education-health gradient by using alternative measures of child personality available in the National Child Development Study. We show that, alternatively to the authors, conclusions, personality contributes to the education-health gradient to an extent nearly as large as that of cognition.