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《Healthy Habits Begin at School: How Education Shapes Health Literacy in China》获得第三届“中韩经济发展论坛”最佳论文奖。

该研究基于中国家庭追踪调查（CFPS）和中国健康素养调查（CHLS）数据，系统分析了受教育年限对个体健康素养的因果影响。研究发现，受教育年限的增加显著提升个体健康素养水平，其作用主要通过塑造日常健康行为与长期习惯而非单纯知识获取实现，为理解教育在健康行为形成与健康素养提升中的基础性作用提供了新的经验证据。

Abstract: 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. Mechanism analysis reveals that this effect is primarily driven by habit formation rather than knowledge acquisition, as schooling shapes daily health-related behaviors. This paper provides the first causal evidence linking education to directly measured health literacy, contributing to both the economics and public health literature.