Does social health insurance spillover to student performance? : evidence from an RDD in Peru

The literature on the effects of Social Health Insurance focuses on its stated goals, namely health status and financial protection; but little work exists on its effect on education. In this paper, we examine the effect of the Peruvian program on student performance by means of a sharp regression discontinuity design. We use a unique individual-level database built from the merger of detailed data from a household survey and standardized test scores from a national census. We find large effects of health insurance on mathematics and reading scores. Moreover, we analyze the main potential mechanisms: health of child, health of family members, and status of household finances. The clearest channel is a lower incidence of anemia among children and mothers, probably due to better nutrition. Finally, we explore whether the effect of health insurance on test scores is heterogeneous by sex to the extent that the data allow. We find it is mostly driven by girls who are better off across the entire score distribution