Family Ruptures and Intergenerational Transmission of Stress

Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater ()
Additional contact information
Maya Rossin-Slater: University of California at Santa Barbara

No 1022, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: The high and rapidly increasing prevalence of mental illnesses underscores the importance of understanding their causal origins. This paper analyzes one factor at a critical stage of human development: exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures during the fetal period. We find that in utero exposure to the death of a maternal close relative has lasting consequences on mental health in adulthood, as captured by 11 and 9 percent increases in the consumption of prescription drugs treating anxiety and depression, respectively, and a 23 percent increase in the average daily dose of medication for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).Further, children exposed prenatally to the death of a relative up to four generations apart are 20 percent more likely to be born low-birth-weight and 11 percent more likely to be hospitalized for conditions originating in the perinatal period in early childhood.Our results imply large welfare gains from preventing fetal exposure to severe stress; the decrease in consumption of prescription drugs treating depression alone can be valued at nearly $ 1 billion. More generally, our results point to in utero stress exposure as a potential cause of the rising incidence of several mental illnesses.

Keywords: Mental health; Stress; Parental death; In utero; Depression; ADHD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I14 I18 I31 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2014-05-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp1022.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:hhs:iuiwop:1022

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().