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Conscientiousness, Education, and Longevity of High-Ability Individuals

In this paper, I investigate whether higher education causally affects longevity. I also investigate the role of personality in producing longevity taking into account its potential interaction with education. The causal status of higher education in affecting health and longevity is unclear in the literature, largely because unknown confounding factors, reverse causality, and difficulty in finding instrumental variables that are both valid and sufficiently strong to reliably estimate the causal effect of higher education on longevity. I examine whether there are confounding factors among early cognitive and noncognitive traits. I estimate the causal effect by controlling for latent confounding psychology factors and for the reverse causality. I represent noncognitive traits by traits that are close to the established Big Five taxonomy of personality, and find a trait of Conscientiousness that has strong effects on both education and longevity. I estimate a model that uses Conscientiousness and education as arguments of a production function for longevity. The model accounts for the endogeneity of education, measurement error in the proxies for Conscientiousness, age-dependence in the effect of education on longevity, and the interaction between education and Conscientiousness in producing longevity. I estimate the model using the 1922-1991 Terman life cycle data of children with high ability, a prospective study with unique life cycle information including detailed background characteristics, early health measures, personality ratings, IQ, and mortality observations. My results show that both Conscientiousness and education increase longevity for males, but that the effect of Conscientiousness on longevity is only strong at low levels of education, and the effect of education on longevity is especially strong at low levels of Conscientiousness. In addition, I show that a failure to account for Conscientiousness leads to a generally upward bias in the estimate of the effect of education on longevity. The bias from omitting Conscientiousness is comparable to the bias from omitting all other control variables in the model. For females, I find that the effects of education and Conscientiousness are not precisely determined. I argue that this lack of strong effects for females born around 1910 might not be generalizable to contemporary female population.