Early-life circumstances predict measures of trust among adults: evidence from hunger episodes in post-war Germany

Maximiliane Hörl, Iris Kesternich, James Smith and Joachim K Winter

No 565088, Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven

Abstract: Can a major shock in childhood permanently shape trust? We consider a hunger episode in Germany after WWII and construct a measure of hunger exposure from official data on caloric rations set monthly by the occupying forces providing regional and temporal variation. We correlate hunger exposure with measures of trust using data from a nationally representative sample of the German population. We show that individuals exposed to low caloric rations in childhood have significantly lower levels of trust as adults. This finding highlights that early-life experiences can have long-term effects in domains other than health, where such effects are well-documented.

Date: 2016-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in CESifo Working Papers, No 6093 , pages 1-36

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/425457 (application/pdf)
KU Leuven intranet only, request a copy at https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/565088

Related works:
Journal Article: Early‐Life Circumstances Predict Measures of Trust among Adults: Evidence from Hunger Episodes in Post‐War Germany (2020)
Working Paper: Early-Life Circumstances Predict Measures of Trust among Adults: Evidence from Hunger Episodes in Post-War Germany (2019)
Working Paper: Early-life Circumstances Predict Measures of Trust among Adults: Evidence from Hunger Episodes in Post-War Germany (2016)
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:ete:ceswps:565088

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().