MRC INTEGRATIVE EPIDEMIOLOGY UNIT (IEU)

SEMINAR SERIES

 Thursday, 11^th February, 2016

16.00 – 17.00 - Room OS6 – Oakfield House

 Gerard J. van den Berg

Professor of Economics, Fellow of the Econometric Society

University of Bristol

 

Disentangling Stress from Nutrition as Determinants of the Long Run Effects of Adverse Conditions Around Birth on Economic and Health Outcomes Late in Life

 

Abstract

Long-run effects of nutritional shortages early in life are often studied using variation in contextual nutritional conditions (e.g. due to a famine). Exposure to such adverse nutritional conditions is likely to cause stress among the affected households. The combination of a lack of nutrition and an increased stress level may have different long-run effects than the occurrence of one of these factors in isolation of the other. Results in famine studies may therefore be driven by stress exposure. We advance on this by considering various types of adverse contextual conditions early in life and by exploiting the variation in temporal and regional exposure to these conditions, among birth cohorts in Germany born in 1930-1950. This includes exposure to bombardments on the civilian population and exposure to famine. The latter are quantified using data we collected from historical sources on daily bombardments per city and local food rations. The individual outcomes measures we consider include adult height, life satisfaction and the occurrence of high blood pressure at old ages. Moreover, we use the actual retirement pension level as an indicator of economic productivity throughout the adult working life, following the principle that it is related to the flow value of an expected present value of lifetime income. This allows us to capture long-run effects on economic outcomes in an encompassing fashion. We find that the long-run effects depend strongly on the relative importance of the different types of adversities early in life.

Biography

In 2009, Gerard J. van den Berg won the so-called Alexander von Humboldt Professorship prize. This is a prize of 3.5 million euro of research funding, supported by the German federal government through the Humboldt Foundation. Van den Berg was the first economist and social scientist to receive this prize. It involved a permanent position as Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Mannheim. Before this, he was Top Professor at the Dept. of Economics at VU University Amsterdam. He is also affiliated to IFAU (Uppsala) since 1999. In addition, he is Program Director at IZA (Bonn), leading the field of Labor Market Policy Evaluation. Previously he worked at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and Stockholm School of Economics. Most of his research is in the fields of econometrics, labor economics, and health economics, notably on duration analysis, treatment evaluation, search theory, and long-run effects of early-life conditions. He has published in Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Review, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, and other journals. He was Joint Managing Editor of The Economic Journal and Associate Editor of the Journal of Econometrics and the Journal of Population Economics. He is currently Professor at the University of Bristol. Since 2013 he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

 

ALL WELCOME