Childhood circumstances and adult outcomes: Evidence from World War II

This paper studies the effects of episodes of stress, poor health, financial hardship and hunger earlier in life on education and health in later life. As a source of identification, we exploit the huge temporal and regional variation of war-related events in Europe during the period from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 to the end of World War II in 1945. We focus on the cohorts born between 1930 and 1954 in 13 European countries, and combine the available historical information with micro-level data from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which provides detailed retrospective information on life histories from childhood to adulthood for people born before 1955. Using these data we find that hunger episodes are more closely associated with war than any other hardship episode. Our instrumental variable estimates suggest that hunger in childhood or early adolescence has important negative effects on educational attainments and various measures of physical and mental health past age 50. They also suggest that suffering hunger for longer periods has stronger negative effects.