How does birth endowment affect individual resilience to an adolescent adversity?

Studies on heterogeneous effects of adversities usually explore one exogenous variation in adversity. We explore two exogenous variations to examine how birth endowment changes individual resilience to an adolescent adversity. While China’s send-down campaign offers a social experiment that exposes people to an adversity in adolescence, we use twins’ difference in birthweight as a natural experiment on birth endowment. The use of exogenous variations in both endowment and adversity enables us to clearly identify the interaction effect of endowment and adversity. We find that effects of send-down experience on income, education, and health differ by birthweight. For brothers with a 10% difference in birthweight, if the higher-endowed male was sent down, then he would earn approximately 12% more than his co-twin. For sisters with a 10% difference in birthweight, if the higher-endowed female was sent down, she is 8% more likely to upgrade her education after the send-down movement, and 9.8 percentage points less likely to be overweight or have chronic diseases. Long-term consequences of an adolescent adversity differ substantially by birth endowment.