Early-life Famine Exposure, Hunger Recall and Later-life Health

Zichen Deng () and Maarten Lindeboom ()
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Zichen Deng: Norwegian School of Economics
Maarten Lindeboom: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

No 2021-04, Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, Monash University

Abstract: We use newly collected individual-level hunger recall information from the China Family Panel Survey to estimate the causal effect of undernourishment on later-life health. We develop a Two-Sample Instrumental Variable (TSIV) estimator that can deal with heterogeneous samples. We find a non-linear relationship between mortality rates, a commonly used famine indicator, and the individual hunger experience. The nonlinearity in famine exposure may explain the variation in the famine’s effect on later life health found in previous studies. We also find that exposure to famine-induced hunger early in life leads to worse health among females fifty years later. This effect is much larger than the reduced-form effect found in previous studies. For males, we find no impact.

Keywords: famine; hunger; developmental origins; two-sample instrumental varia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C26 I12 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-hea and nep-isf
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