Overview
Adriana Lleras-Muney is a labor and health economist, Professor of Economics at UCLA (formerly at Princeton). She is best known for using variation in compulsory schooling laws across U.S. states and cohorts as an instrumental variable to identify the causal effect of education on adult mortality — among the first credible causal estimates of the education-mortality link. Her research spans the economics of health, education, and immigration.
Key Contributions
- Lleras-Muney (2005): "The Relationship Between Education and Adult Mortality in the United States," Review of Economic Studies 72(1): 189–221. Uses state-level compulsory schooling laws (1915–1939) as instruments for years of schooling; finds one additional year of schooling reduces the probability of dying in the next 10 years by approximately 3.6 percentage points. One of the most-cited papers establishing a causal (not merely correlational) education-mortality effect.
- Co-author of Cutler, Deaton, and Lleras-Muney (2006), a JEP synthesis arguing that knowledge and technology — not income — are the ultimate determinants of mortality.
- Co-author (with David Cutler) of work on the mechanisms through which education affects health behaviors, finding that income, insurance, and cognitive/informational channels collectively explain roughly 60% of the education-behavior gradient (Cutler and Lleras-Muney 2010).
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