Full Citation

Title: Children of the Mortality Revolution Infectious Disease and Long-run Outcome

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2014

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of infectious disease exposure in early childhood on adult labor market outcomes. To do this, I exploit the exogenous variations in public health projects and new drugs during the Mortality Revolution (1901-1955) in the United States, an era with unmatched mortality decline, driven by innovations in disease control technologies. I create an index of early childhood disease exposure that exploits cross-state variation in pre-intervention disease prevalence, and time variation arising from medical innovations during this period. The results indicate that higher disease prevalence in childhood reduces adult education attainment and earnings, and that public health interventions contributed to roughly 10% of the changes in labor market outcomes between the 1901 and 1955 cohorts. The effect per unit of mortality decline is stronger in the second half of this period (1937-1955), when medications such as penicillin and sulfa drugs were introduced. My findings also shed light on the benefit of controlling infectious diseases in the developing world.

Url: http://econ.hunter.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Zhang.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Zhang, Xiaohan

Publisher: University of California Davis

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Fertility and Mortality, Health

Countries: