Economic Conditions at Birth, Birth Weight, Ability, and the Causal Path to Cardiovascular Mortality

Gerard van den Berg and Bitte Modin ()
Additional contact information
Bitte Modin: Centre for Health Equity Studies - CHESS

No 7605, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We analyze interaction effects of birth weight and the business cycle at birth on individual cardiovascular (CV) mortality later in life. In addition, we examine to what extent these long-run effects run by way of cognitive ability and education and to what extent those mitigate the long-run effects. We use individual records of Swedish birth cohorts from 1915–1929 covering birth weight, family characteristics, school grades, sibling identifiers, and outcomes later in life including the death cause. The birth weight distribution does not vary over the business cycle. The association between birth weight (across the full range) and CV mortality rate later in life is significantly stronger if the individual is born in a recession. This is not explained by differential fertility by social class over the cycle. Ability itself, as measured at age 10, varies with birth weight and the cycle at birth. But the long-run effects of early-life conditions appear to mostly reflect direct biological mechanisms. We do not find evidence of indirect pathways through ability or education, and the long-run effects are not mitigated by education.

Keywords: longevity; genetic determinants; health; business cycle; life expectancy; cardiovascular disease; school grades; siblings; fetal programming; cause of death; life course; developmental origins; nature and nurture; cognitive ability; education; stratified partial likelihood; recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C41 E32 I10 I12 I21 I31 J10 J13 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-hea, nep-ltv and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7605.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Economic Conditions at Birth, Birth Weight, Ability, and the Causal Path to Cardiovascular Mortality (2013)
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:dp7605

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 ().