Instrumental Variable Estimation of the Causal Effect of Hunger Early in Life on Health Later in Life

Abstract

Numerous studies have evaluated the effect of nutrition early in life on health much later in life by comparing individuals born during a famine to others. Nutritional intake is typically unobserved and endogenous, whereas famines arguably provide exogenous variation in the provision of nutrition. However, living through a famine early in life does not necessarily imply a lack of nutrition during that age interval, and vice versa, and in this sense the observed difference at most provides a qualitative assessment of the average causal effect of a nutritional shortage, which is the parameter of interest. In this paper we estimate this average causal effect on health outcomes later in life, by applying instrumental variable estimation, using data with self-reported periods of hunger earlier in life, with famines as instruments. The data contain samples from European countries and include birth cohorts exposed to various famines in the 20th century. We use two-sample IV estimation to deal with imperfect recollection of conditions at very early stages of life. The estimated average causal effects often exceed famine effects by a factor three.

Long‐Run Health Repercussions of Drought Shocks: Evidence from South African Homelands

“…Martorell et al (1994) and Martorell (1999) provide an early general discussion of the link between childhood nutrition and disease and adult health. Recent studies that have measured the longer run health impacts of early-life exposure to various types of shocks include Almond (2006) on the Spanish flu, Chen and Zhou (2007), Meng and Qian (2009) Lindeboom et al (2010) and Van den Berg et al (2011) on the Chinese and Dutch famines, Maccini and Yang (2009) and Aguilar and Vicarelli (2012) on rainfall shocks in Indonesia and in Mexico, and Banerjee et al (2010) on insect infestations of agricultural crops. nutrition and disease environmentin utero and during early childhood matter for various dimensions of health in later life.…”

Summer‐born struggle: The effect of school starting age on health, education, and work

“…This approach is a fuzzy RD design, with first stage and reduced form calculated from two separate samples. We base our approach on the theoretical work by Angrist and Krueger (1992) and Inoue and Solon (2010), along with the applied studies by Dee and Evans (2003), Devereux and Hart (2010), and Van den Berg et al (2016).…”

Early‐Life Circumstances Predict Measures of Trust among Adults: Evidence from Hunger Episodes in Post‐War Germany

“…In addition to the direct effects of experiencing hunger on trust preferences, the hunger episode might influence trust through a number of indirect channels. The literature of the long-term effects of hunger has documented negative effects on health as well as education and labor market outcomes (Almond and Currie, 2011;Barker, 1992Barker, , 2004Juerges, 2013;van den Berg et al, 2015). In Table 4, we report the results of regression models that explore some of these potential causal channels, following the ideas put forward in mediation analysis (e.g., Baron and Kenny, 1986;MacKinnon et al, 2007).…”

“…Our analysis is motivated by a recent wave of research showing that early-life circumstances and shocks, even those experienced in utero, not only predict adult health outcomes (Barker, 1992(Barker, , 2004Almond and Currie, 2011;van den Berg et al, 2015) but also socio-economic outcomes later in life. Adult outcomes that are affected by shocks such as the experience of war or exposure to prolonged periods of hunger early in life include education and labor market status (Goodman et al, 2011;Juerges, 2013;Akbulut-Yuksel, 2014;Kesternich et al, 2014), preferences for food consumption (Kesternich et al, 2015), the development of egalitarian motivations (Bauer et al, 2014), and subjective well-being (Bertoni, 2015).…”