The Impact of Early Life Economic Conditions on Cause-Specific Mortality During Adulthood

Gary Y.C. Yeung, Gerard van den Berg, Maarten Lindeboom () and France Portrait ()
Additional contact information
Gary Y.C. Yeung: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
France Portrait: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

No 6520, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The aim of this study is to assess the effects of economic conditions in early life on cause-specific mortality during adulthood. The analyses are performed on a unique historical sample of 14,520 Dutch individuals born in 1880-1918, who are followed throughout life. The economic conditions in early life are characterized using cyclical variations in annual real per capital Gross Domestic Product during pregnancy and the first year of life. Exposure to recessions during pregnancy and/or the first year of life appears to significantly increase all-cause mortality risks and cancer mortality risks of older males and females. It also significantly increases mortality risks due to cardiovascular diseases and chronic respiratory diseases of older females. The residual life expectancies are up to 4.5 to 8% lower for all-cause mortality and up to 1.5 to 7.8% lower for cause-specific mortality. Our analyses show that cardiovascular and cancer mortality risks are related and that not taking this association into account leads to biased inference.

Keywords: survival analyses; cardiovascular disease; cancer; life expectancy; competing mortality risks; recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C41 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2012-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2014, 27 (3), 895-919

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6520.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of early-life economic conditionson cause-specific mortality during adulthood (2014)
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:iza:izadps:dp6520

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().