Maternal Stress and Offspring Lifelong Labor Market Outcomes

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy and link this data to unique historical data with detailed information about war casualties and Nazi raids across space (Municipality) and time. We find that prenatal stress exposure leads to lower wage earnings when workers start their career, and that this effect persists until retirement. The earnings penalty is in large part due to the type of job that people hold and interruptions in their working career due to unemployment. We further show that workers exposed to in-utero stress face larger earnings reductions after job loss due to mass layoffs. This earnings loss deepens their relative disadvantage over time.

Severe Prenatal Shocks and Adolescent Health: Evidence from the Dutch Hunger Winter

“…Neelsen and Stratmann (2011) examine the effects of the Greek famine 1941-1942 using census data and find negative impacts on education and literacy for those exposed in infancy; additionally, they find stronger effects for the urban-born cohorts compared to the rural-born ones, suggesting, like other studies, that the famine was mostly experienced in the urban centres. 7 Atella et al (2020) exploit Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII and find that workers exposed to raids in utero have worse labor market outcomes. Allais et al (2021) show that both the intensity of WWII exposure in France (measured as the number of military casualties) and self-reported episodes of hunger are associated with worse health outcomes for a sample of women over 20s.…”