Early poverty exposure predicts young adult educational outcomes in China

Comparative research suggests that poverty in childhood, and especially in the early years, impedes educational attainment. With longitudinal data from China, we estimate hazard models of dropping out of school in young adulthood with two dynamic measures of childhood poverty: poverty spell indicators that distinguish poverty in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence, and poverty indices that measure the depth of poverty and distinguish chronic from transient poverty.Four main results emerge: 1) Children who experience spells in poverty leave school at a higher rate than others, even adjusting for poverty in later periods; 2) Transient poverty is more widespread, and shows a greater negative association with school-leaving, than chronic poverty; 3) Early childhood poverty shows greater negative associations with education outcomes than poverty in later periods; and 4) Girls may be more susceptible than boys to early poverty. We further test two possible mechanisms of impact: early nutrition poverty and school fees. While lower protein intake at an early stage of life is related to poorer educational outcomes in young adulthood, adjusting for nutritional deprivation does not attenuate the associations of early transient income poverty. Results do not suggest that cohorts that experienced school-fee abolishment policies experienced different poverty effects than other cohorts.     

The Role of Economic Shocks on Health: Evidence from German Reunification

Sudden economic shocks impact the everyday lives of people from one day to the next. A number of studies have examined the association between economic fluctuations and health; however, no consensus on the nature of this relationship has been established. By exploiting the dramatic economic fluctuations following the German Reunification of 1990, which included a sudden change from a socialist to a capitalist system in East Germany, this study examines the association between broad negative economic shocks and health. The article finds that increases in state unemployment rates are associated with large and statistically significant declines in health outcomes. Estimates are stronger for people who became unemployed shortly after reunification, for low‐income individuals, and for East Germans, a group confronted with larger economic fluctuations. When examining potential mechanisms that could explain the observed health deteriorations, the study finds significant reductions in exercise frequency and increases in economic uncertainty and overall stress.     

Early-life experience of land reform and entrepreneurship

We examine the long-run impact of land reform experience in childhood and adolescence on entrepreneurship later in life. To do so, we take advantage of village-level variation in the Household Responsibility System (HRS) reform in China that transformed land property rights from a communal system into an individualized tenure system. We find that early-life exposure to land reform increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur in adulthood. This positive association is mainly driven by exposure to the HRS increasing the propensity for solo and necessity entrepreneurship. We also find considerable heterogeneity in the long-run impact of early-life HRS reform exposure across subsamples. Females, individuals from low-income families, individuals with less-educated parents and individuals in the central region are more likely to become entreprenuers following early-life exposure to land reform. Overall, while previous research has found that land titling reform in China significantly increased business creation in rural areas, our findings imply that the positive impact of land reform on entrepreneurial ventures is likely to be understated if its long-run impact on those exposed to land reform early in life on the likelihood of their becoming entrepreneurs later in life is not considered.     

Survival in 19th century cities: The larger the city, the smaller your chances

Using Union Army veterans’ lifetime socioeconomic and health records, this essay finds a consistent and persistent hierarchy in survival rates and hazard ratios by urban size at and across three stages of life: birth, late adolescence, and death. This urban mortality penalty remains after controlling for variables associated with each individual veteran. The results of our geographical mobility analyses suggest that, with respect to these veterans, the search for an explanation should focus on late adolescence and adulthood as much as on early life. A complete explanation of the penalty requires a project of greater scope.     

High School Dropouts and Sexually Transmitted Infections

People who drop out of high school fare worse in many aspects of life. We analyze the relationship between dropping out of high school and the probability of contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Previous studies on the relationship between dropout status and sexual outcomes have not empirically addressed unobserved heterogeneity at the individual level. Using fixed effects estimators, we find evidence supporting a positive relationship between dropping out of high school and the risk of contracting an STI for females. Furthermore, we present evidence that illustrates differences between the romantic partners of dropouts versus enrolled students. These differences suggest that female dropouts may be more susceptible to contracting STIs because they partner with significantly different types of people than do nondropouts. Our results point to a previously undocumented benefit of encouraging those at risk of dropping out to stay in school longer.     

The long shadows of war in China: Battle shocks in early life and health/wealth accumulation

This paper investigates the long-term effects of the 2nd Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945) and the later Chinese Civil War (1946–1950) on health and wealth outcomes of 45+ elder individuals in China. We find that exposure to the battle shock significantly reduces later adult health outcome such as lung function. Moreover, the later wealth accumulation is also affected negatively. According to our conservative estimates, exposure to battle shock(s) would reduce the lung capability by approximately 5% compared to the population mean and the wealth level by approximately 21% compared to the non-shocked groups. Exploiting the exogenous imposition of wealth equality during the 1950–1978 communism experiment in China, we argue it is the health accumulation channel which inherited the negative battle shocks rather than the wealth accumulation channel. We investigate quantitatively which health-model ingredients can replicate the lifecycle health/wealth dynamics of such early life shocks.     

Social Network and Weight Misperception among Adolescents

It is recognized that public health intervention targeted toward changing lifestyle behaviors to reduce overweight status is a considerable challenge. It is important that individuals recognize their overweight status as a health risk in order for an effective change in lifestyle behaviors to occur, and growing evidence suggests that actual weight and perception of weight status often do not match, especially among adolescents. In this article, we explore the extent to which exposure to heavier peers and parents affects misperception of their own weight status by adolescents. Using data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents, we estimated instrumental variable models with school‐level fixed effects to account for bidirectionality of peer influence and environmental confounders. Our results indicate that individuals who live in an environment that exposes them to overweight/obese parents and heavier peers tend to misperceive their weight status and think of themselves to be of lower weight than they actually are. Our analysis also revealed differential effects by gender and type of peers.     

The Impact of Housing Prices on Health in the United States Before,During, and After the Great Recession

We estimate the effects of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area housing prices on a variety of health outcomes and health-related behaviors separately for homeowners and tenants. The constructed data set consists of information on individuals from the 2002–2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System combined with homeownership data from the March Current Population Survey and housing prices from Freddie Mac. We estimate positive effects on homeowners' mental health when housing prices increase. We also find negative effects on tenants' health and health-related behaviors with increases in housing prices. These estimated contemporaneous effects are concentrated among low-income homeowners and tenants, and the effects for tenants are not persistent in the long run. However, the cumulative effects of an increase in housing prices on obesity become more pronounced for homeowners in the long run, resulting in worse self-reported health.     

The effects of exposure to high temperatures during pregnancy on adolescent mental health: Evidence from China

This paper provides the first study to explore the relationship between exposure to ambient temperatures during pregnancy and adolescent mental health in China. The results show that experiencing one more hot day relative to local historical contemporaneous average values during pregnancy significantly increases the likelihood of mental health disorders in adolescence. The impact is larger in the first and second trimesters. Individuals born in the northern region and whose mothers work in agriculture are more vulnerable to high temperatures. Prenatal exposure to hot days is more harmful to the mental health of older adolescents. Additionally, the adverse effects are similar for both men and women and individuals with rural and urban hukou. Biological effects, income effects, and human capital accumulation might be three operative channels of the impact. These findings add to the evidence on the lasting health effects of early life exposure to climatic shocks and call for policy interventions during pregnancy.     

Urban mortality in Greece: Hermoupolis (1859–1940)

The paper examines mortality patterns in the city of Hermoupolis, on the Greek island of Syros, from 1859 to 1940. It produces important new insights into Mediterranean urban historical demography and is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilising the largest and one of the longest time series at the individual level yet calculated from civil registration and census data. Abridged life tables were constructed for the first time for a Greek urban settlement, enabling the calculation of age-specific mortality rates and life expectancies. Hermoupolis experienced much higher mortality levels than the national average. The findings suggest that early childhood mortality started to decline rapidly from the late nineteenth century onwards, with declines in early adulthood and infancy following. The paper reinforces and confirms our limited knowledge about the timing of the mortality transition in Greece. It proposes that an urban penalty was clearly operating in the country even during the early twentieth century. Finally, this paper suggests that a combination of factors was responsible for the mortality decline in Hermoupolis, including wider access to water, which even when it was not clean enough to drink, nevertheless enabled improvements in personal hygiene among the residents of the city.     

The late emergence of socioeconomic mortality differentials: A micro-level study of adult mortality in southern Sweden 1815–1968

This paper deals with socioeconomic differences in adult mortality in southern Sweden 1815–1968, a period of transformation from an agricultural to a modern industrial society and increasing life expectancy. We use longitudinal micro-level data with information on demographic events, household structure and socioeconomic status. The main finding is that the socioeconomic gradient is a very recent phenomenon. While mortality fell in all socioeconomic groups it was not until the 1950s that a socioeconomic gradient appeared, and then only among adults in working ages. For the elderly, we find no significant mortality differentials between various social groups at any time. These results are consistent with the divergence hypothesis, although this process started much later than previously thought, and was not an immediate consequence of industrialization.     

The impact of diabetes insurance mandates on infant health

Among the factors thought to contribute to lagging improvements in infant health in recent years are increasing obesity and diabetes prevalence among women of childbearing age. This article uses a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐difference empirical strategy to investigate the impact of mandated insurance coverage for diabetes on adverse pregnancy outcomes. Among educated women, who have high rates of coverage through private insurance that is subject to insurance mandates, diabetes mandates are associated with a reduction in low birth weight and premature birth prevalence. These gains are concentrated among older women and are larger for African‐Americans. There is a weaker effect on the prevalence of high birth weight, potentially because of the deleterious effects of an increased probability of pregnancy weight gain in excess of 35 pounds among diabetic women in states with mandates.     

Socioeconomic inequalities in death from past to present: An introduction

In the early postwar period, improvements in life expectancy in many Western countries made health authorities, health scientists and politicians believe that social differences in mortality converged. The assumption was that inequality, when measured as death rates, was on steady decline, possibly even on the brink of disappearing. The question is then, how far back in time can social differences in mortality be traced? Can they be traced back to the agricultural society or are they a result of industrialization? Whether or not these differences are the result of the industrial revolution became a lively debated issue at the time and has continued to be discussed to date. While many scholars have taken a Malthusian view, that mortality in the past was largely determined by economic factors, others argue that mortality was determined by non-economic factors, leaving little room for a social gradient in mortality. Due to lack of coherent data covering long time periods, our knowledge has been based on bits and pieces of evidence from various locations and time periods. The evidence used is not only fragmentary but furthermore only partly comparable as different definitions of social class and mortality have been used.Here we present results from seven new studies of locations in Western and Southern Europe, the US and Canada for which individual-level longitudinal data exists during the industrialization period. Most of these studies cover also the first part of the twentieth century, a period for which such microdata hitherto has largely been lacking. Taken together, they have a wide geographic coverage and a very long time horizon. Based on these studies, we argue that social differences appeared both long before and long after the industrial breakthrough, in both cases implying that these differences are not directly related to industrialization. We also argue that the association between income and mortality observed today most likely is a recent phenomenon. Overall, a causal link between income and mortality is put into question.     

Postschool education and training: Accessible to all?

This article examines knowledge and skill development during early adulthood when the individual has severed ties with formal education and entered the world of work. Focusing on a cohort of young men from the National Longitudinal Surveys, the paper examines the economic and social forces influencing participation in various forms of postschool education and training. A recursive model is used to explore skill development patterns over the lifecycle. Attention is focused on the role of early human capital development and its influence on the cost and incentives for subsequent skill development in the adult working years. The findings point to the cumulative nature of skill development over the lifecycle with some important implications for efforts to reduce economic and social inequalities for blacks and whites.     

The long-term effects of automatic grade promotion on child development

Grade retention is a common practice in many countries despite the fact that the evidence for its influence on child development is mixed. In 2006, China introduced a new rule that explicitly prohibited grade repetition during the compulsory education period. Exploiting the staggered introduction of this policy across provinces and applying a flexible difference-in-differences strategy, we analyze the causal effects of the reform on various student outcomes, including school completion and cognitive skills, mental health and self-confidence in early adulthood. The results indicate that automatic grade promotion hurts students' educational development, especially for boys and for children with less-educated mothers. On the other hand, however, the reform indeed improved mental health, as noted by the proponents of social promotion. More importantly, we find that all the policy impacts are concentrated solely among students exposed to the reform in an early grade, particularly 1st-3rd grade. The results further indicate that removing the “threat” of grade retention results in a decrease in study time in the long run, which we interpret as a potential mechanism.     

Memory of famine: The persistent impact of famine experience on food waste behavior

The 1959–1961 Great Famine in China was one of the most devastating events in history and had long-term effects on economic behavior. This paper seeks to provide a novel explanation for heterogeneous food waste behaviors across age cohorts from the perspective of differing famine experiences. Based on 2004–2009 China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data, this paper constructs a difference-in-difference estimator to explore the long-term effects of the early-life famine experience of the household head on household food waste behavior in later life. The results indicate that the more serious famine that the household head experienced in early life was, the less wasted food and lost calories per capita there were, especially for adolescence during the famine. The mechanism analysis shows that households whose heads experienced the 1959–1961 Great Famine in early life tend to save more than those whose head did not. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the formation of preference and the variation in household food waste behaviors across age cohorts.