Does the More Educated Utilize More Health Care Services? Evidence from Vietnam Using a Regression Discontinuity Design

In 1991 Vietnam implemented a compulsory schooling reform that provides this paper a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of education on health care utilization measured by the probability of doctor visit, the frequency of doctor visit and per visit out-of-pocket expenditure with a regression discontinuity design. The paper finds that schooling induces considerable impacts on health care utilization although the signs of the impacts changes with specific types of health care service examined. In particular, increased education aggrandizes inpatient utilization whereas it reduces outpatient health care utilization for both public and private health sectors. The estimates are strongly robust to various windows of the sample choice. The paper also discovers that the links between education and health insurance or income play very essential roles as potential mechanisms to explain the causal impacts of education on health care utilization in Vietnam.