Although empirical work has shown that personal and spousal education are both related to health, the nature of these associations has been harder to establish. People select into marriages on the basis of observed and hard-to-observe characteristics, complicating the job of the researcher who wishes to make causal inferences. In this article, we implement a within-sibling-pair design that exploits variation within pairs in spousal education to generate estimates of spousal crossover effects. Results—based on a long-term study of siblings and their spouses—suggest that spousal education is positively related to health, but to a greater degree for women than men. Sensitivity analyses show that these patterns are unlikely to derive from measured differences between individuals or unmeasured characteristics that sort them into unions. These results are consistent with network-based theories of social capital, which view education as a resource that can be mobilized by network ties to enhance health.

尽管实证研究表明，个人和配偶教育都与健康有关，但这些关联的性质更难确定。人们根据观察到的和难以观察到的特征选择婚姻，这使希望进行因果推断的研究人员的工作变得复杂。在本文中，我们实现了一个兄弟姐妹对内的设计，该设计利用配偶教育中的对内变化来生成配偶交叉效应的估计。结果——基于对兄弟姐妹及其配偶的长期研究——表明配偶教育与健康呈正相关，但对女性的影响程度高于男性。敏感性分析表明，这些模式不太可能来自个体之间的测量差异或将他们分类为联合的未测量特征。