Does a pint a day affect your child's pay? The effect of prenatal alcohol exposure on adult outcomes

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract This paper utilizes a Swedish alcohol policy experiment conducted in the late 1960s to identify the impact of prenatal alcohol exposure on educational attainments and labor market outcomes. The experiment started in November 1967 and was prematurely discontinued in July 1968 due to a sharp increase in alcohol consumption in the experimental regions, particularly among youths. Using a difference-in-difference-indifferences estimation strategy we find that around the age of 30 the cohort in utero during the experiment has substantially reduced educational attainments, lower earnings and higher welfare dependency rates compared to the surrounding cohorts. The results indicate that investments in early-life health have far-reaching effects on economic outcomes in later life. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

Economic status, air quality, and child health: Evidence from inversion episodes

“…The capacity formation framework of Cunha and Heckman (2007) illustrates how childhood health could generate significant effects on subsequent health, educational attainment and labor market outcomes through dynamic complementarities and cross productivity with the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. An increasing number of design based studies have also found that early life health does not only influence adult health, but also educational attainments (Almond, Edlund and Palme, 2009) and labor market outcomes (Almond, 2006;Nilsson, 2008). By now, there is strong evidence on the link between parents' socio economic status and child health (c.f.…”

The scourge of Asian Flu: in utero exposure to pandemic influenza and the development of a cohort of British children

“…As a result, much of the empirical economics literature has used natural experiments to generate sharp, random shocks to foetal health conditions, either across space or cohorts 2 . Examples include disease outbreaks (Almond, 2006;Almond & Mazumder, 2005), in utero exposure to radioactive emissions (Almond, Edlund, & Palme, 2008;Otake & Schull, 1998) famine (Almond et al, 2007;Banerjee et al, 2007), fasting (Almond & Mazumder, 2008), and policy induced changes in alcohol consumption (Nilsson, 2008). This approach has successfully established long run effects of foetal health shocks.…”

Alcohol Exposure In Utero and Child Academic Achievement

“…In addition, we are not the first to find such large effects: the few papers that attempt to deal with unobserved confounding in alcohol exposure also find large negative effects on child development (Nilsson, 2008;W€ ust, 2010;Zhang, 2010).…”

“…Although we argue that our IV estimates are an upper bound of the true causal effect, we are not the first to estimate such large effects, or to see a different association from the OLS after attempting to account for residual confounding. Indeed, Nilsson (2008) finds substantially large effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on human capital outcomes in Sweden. Similarly, Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1994) and W€ ust (2010) obtain considerably larger negative effects in within-mother specifications compared to more ambiguous results in the OLS or GLS.…”