The relative importance of shocks in a cohort's early and later life conditions on age-specific mortality

Mikko Myrskylä
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Mikko Myrskylä: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

No WP-2010-009, MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Abstract: The relative importance of a cohort’s early life conditions, compared to later period conditions, on adult- and old-age mortality is not known. This paper studies how cohort-level mortality depends on shocks in the cohort’s early and later life (period) conditions. I use cohort’s own mortality as a proxy for the early life conditions, and define shocks as deviations from trend. Using historical data for five European countries I find that shocks in early life conditions are only weakly associated with cohort’s later mortality. This may be because individual-level health is robust to early life conditions, or because at the cohort-level scarring, selection and immunity cancel each other. Shocks in period conditions, measured as deviations from trend in period child mortality, are strongly and positively correlated with mortality at all older ages. The results suggest that at the cohort-level period conditions drive mortality change.

Keywords: Europe; mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur and nep-hea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2010-009

DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2010-009

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