Life expectancy and schooling: new insights from cross-country data

I argue that the relationship between life expectancy and schooling crucially depends on which measure of life expectancy one uses. In particular, I show that while the change in life expectancy at birth between 1960 and 1990 is positively correlated with percentage change in schooling, the change in life expectancy at age 5 is, at best, uncorrelated with percentage change in schooling. This evidence suggests that increasing life horizon beyond the early crucial childhood years for formal acquisition of human capital is not as quantitatively important as previously thought.