The long-term and intergenerational effects of early-life hunger experience on human capital and labor market outcomes

Yuxin Yao and Yi Zhang

China Economic Review, 2023, vol. 77, issue C

Abstract: Using individual-level retrospective data on early-life hunger experience from China, we investigate the long-term effects of early nutritional deprivation on one's own and adult children's human capital and labor market outcomes. With an instrumental variable approach, we find that hunger experience lowers educational attainment and job quality of the first generation. But this negative impact on human capital does not transmit to the second generation, possibly due to parents' compensatory behavior of human capital investment and extra attention given to children. Our findings imply that the negative impact of non-extreme nutritional adversities on human capital and labor market outcomes are likely to decrease over generations.

Keywords: Hunger experience; Human capital; Long-term effects; Intergenerational effects; Retrospective data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X22001729
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:chieco:v:77:y:2023:i:c:s1043951x22001729

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2022.101914

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().