近日，北京大学市场经济研究中心主任秦雪征教授的合作论文《Does education improve health literacy? Evidence from China’s compulsory education law》在健康经济学领域期刊《Economics & Human Biology》2026年9月第62卷正式发表。

摘要：This study examines the causal impact of education on health literacy using a newly collected dataset from China that merges the 2020 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) with our self-designed Chinese Health Literacy Survey (CHLS). To address endogeneity concerns, we exploit the staggered implementation of the 1986 Compulsory Education Law as an instrumental variable. We find that one additional year of education increases health literacy by 17.3% of a standard deviation. This paper provides the first causal evidence linking education to directly measured health literacy, contributing to both the economics and public health literature.