Parental education and children's old-age mortality: Evidence using college expansions

This paper examines the intergenerational effects of parental college education on children's old-age mortality, focusing on health benefits flowing from parents to children. We utilize historical data of college expansions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, employ Social Security Administration death records linked with the full count 1940 census, and implement a difference-in-difference approach to exploit parental cross-cohort variations in exposure combined with spatial and temporal expansions in colleges. We document that parental exposure to new college openings during adolescence is associated with significant increases in children's later life old age longevity, with treatment-on-treated effects ranging from 4.2 to 15.4 months. Heterogeneity analyses uncover dynamic complementarities with educational policies whereby the effects of parental exposure to college expansions amplify in states with more stringent compulsory schooling and child labor laws. Furthermore, we provide evidence of improvements in parental education, income, and socioeconomic status, along with significant increases in children's education as key mechanism channels. Monetizing the implied gains in children's life expectancy using standard value-of-statistical-life estimates suggests aggregate benefits on the order of $6-8 billion per additional college opening.