Maternal Stress and Offspring Lifelong Labor Market Outcomes

Vincenzo Atella, Edoardo Di Porto, Joanna Kopinska and Maarten Lindeboom ()
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Maarten Lindeboom: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

No 13744, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy and link this data to unique historical data with detailed information about war casualties and Nazi raids across space (Municipality) and time. We find that prenatal stress exposure leads to lower wage earnings when workers start their career, and that this effect persists until retirement. The earnings penalty is in large part due to the type of job that people hold and interruptions in their working career due to unemployment. We further show that workers exposed to in-utero stress face larger earnings reductions after job loss due to mass layoffs. This earnings loss deepens their relative disadvantage over time.

Keywords: early-life; stress; life-long earnings; mass layoff; dynamic complementarities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 84 pages
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Maternal Stress and Offspring Lifelong Labor Market Outcomes (2021)
Working Paper: Maternal Stress and Offspring Lifelong Labor Market Outcomes (2020)
Working Paper: Maternal Stress and Offspring Lifelong Labor Market Outcomes (2020)
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