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 21-054/V, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

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 the Great Chinese Famine and hunger recall. The non-linearity 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 larger than the reduced-form effect found in previous studies. For males, we find no impact.

Keywords: famine; hunger; developmental origins; two-sample instrumental variable (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C26 I12 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-06-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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