Childhood Health and Sibling Outcomes: The Shared Burden and Benefit of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

John Parman ()

No 19505, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: There is a growing body of evidence showing that negative childhood health shocks have long term consequences in terms of health, human capital formation and labor market outcomes. However, by altering the relative prices of child quality across siblings, these health shocks can also affect investments in and the outcomes of healthy siblings. This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic to test how household resources are reallocated when there is a health shock to one child. Using a new dataset linking census data on childhood households to health and education data from military enlistment records, I show that families with a child in utero during the pandemic shifted resources to older siblings of that child, leading to significantly higher educational attainments and high school graduation rates for these older siblings. There are no significant effects for younger siblings born after the pandemic. These results suggest that the reallocation of household resources in response to a negative childhood health shock tended to reinforce rather than compensate for differences in endowments across children.

JEL-codes: I1 J13 J24 N3 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-hea
Note: DAE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as Explorations in Economic History Volume 58, October 2015, Pages 22–43 Cover image Childhood health and sibling outcomes: Nurture Reinforcing nature during the 1918 influenza pandemic ☆ John Parman

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19505.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19505

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19505

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().