Several studies have established associations between early-life non-cognitive skills and later-life health and health behaviours. However, no study addresses the more important policy concern about how this relationship varies along the health distribution. We use unconditional quantile regression to analyse the effects of adolescent non-cognitive skills across the distributions of the health-related quality of life at age 50 and biomarkers at age 45 years. We examine the effects of measures of conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism recorded at age 16 for 3585 individuals from the National Child Development Study. Adolescent conscientiousness is positively associated with ability to cope with stress and negatively associated with risk of cardiovascular disease in middle-age. Adolescent agreeableness is associated with higher health-related quality of life and lower physiological ‘wear and tear’, but negatively associated with ability to cope with stress in middle-age. Adolescent neuroticism is associated with lower health-related quality of life, higher physiological ‘wear and tear’, and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease in middle-age. All of these associations are stronger at the lower end of the health distribution except for the cardiovascular risk biomarkers. These associations are robust to correcting for attrition using inverse probability weighting and consistent with causal bounds assuming proportional selection on observables and unobservables. They suggest policies that improve non-cognitive skills in adolescence could offer most long-term health benefit to those with the poorest health.

一些研究已经建立了早年非认知技能与晚年健康和健康行为之间的关联。然而，没有研究解决更重要的政策问题，即这种关系如何随着健康分布而变化。我们使用无条件分位数回归来分析青少年非认知技能对 50 岁健康相关生活质量和 45 岁生物标志物分布的影响。我们检查了来自国家儿童发展研究的 3585 名个体在 16 岁时记录的尽责性、宜人性和神经质测量的影响。青少年的责任心与应对压力的能力呈正相关，与中年心血管疾病的风险呈负相关。青少年的宜人性与较高的健康相关生活质量和较低的生理“磨损”相关，但与中年应对压力的能力呈负相关。青少年神经质与较低的健康相关生活质量、较高的生理“磨损”和较高的中年心血管疾病风险有关。除心血管风险生物标志物外，所有这些关联在健康分布的低端都更强。这些关联对于使用逆概率加权来校正损耗是稳健的，并且与假设对可观察和不可观察按比例选择的因果界限一致。他们建议，提高青春期非认知技能的政策可以为健康状况最差的人提供最长期的健康益处。