@article{a780b2c8b13a48b095e74da8b50e871e,
title = "Born at the right time? Childhood health and the business cycle",
abstract = "We analyze the relationship between the state of the business cycle at birth and childhood health. We use a retrospective survey on self-reported childhood health for ten Western European countries and combine it with historically and internationally comparable data on the Gross Domestic Product. We validate the self-reported data by comparing them to realized illness spells. We find a positive relationship between being born in a recession and childhood health. This relationship is not driven by selection effects due to heightened infant mortality during recessions. Placebo regressions indicate that the observed effect is not spurious.",
keywords = "Child, Child Welfare, Economic Recession, Europe, Female, Gross Domestic Product, Health Surveys, Humans, Infant, Infant Mortality, Infant, Newborn, Male, Reproducibility of Results, Retrospective Studies, Time Factors, SOCIOECONOMIC-STATUS, INFANT-MORTALITY, RECESSIONS GOOD, LIFE HEALTH, IMPACT, INCOME, COUNTRIES, SHOCKS, CONSEQUENCES, GRADIENT",
author = "Viola Angelini and Mierau, {Jochen O.}",
note = "Funding Information: We gratefully acknowledge the Editor and four anonymous referees for constructive comments and suggestions. We also thank Rob Alessie, Danilo Cavapozzi, Jan Jacobs, Enkelejda Havari, Michael Hummer, Giovanni Mastrobuoni and Aljar Meesters as well as seminar participants at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, at the SHARE users' conference in Venice, Italy, at the Alpine Population Conference in La Thuile, Italy, the Population Association of America in New Orleans, Louisiana, and at the Spring Meeting of Young Economists in Aarhus, Denmark for useful discussions. This paper uses data from SHARELIFE release 1, as of November 24th 2010. The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through the 5th framework programme (project QLK6-CT-2001-00360 in the thematic programme Quality of Life), through the 6th framework programme (projects SHARE-I3, RII-CT-2006-062193, COMPARE, CIT5-CT-2005-028857, and SHARELIFE, CIT4-CT-2006-028812) and through the 7th framework programme (SHARE-PREP, 211909 and SHARE-LEAP, 227822). Additional funding from the U.S. National Institute on Aging (U01 AG09740-13S2, P01 AG005842, P01 AG08291, P30 AG12815, Y1-AG-4553-01 and OGHA 04-064, IAG BSR06-11, R21 AG025169) as well as from various national sources is gratefully acknowledged (see www.share-project.org for a full list of funding institutions). All robustness checks and further analyses that we cite in the paper are available on request. ",
year = "2014",
month = may,
doi = "10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.03.014",
language = "English",
volume = "109",
pages = "35--43",
journal = "Social Science & Medicine",
issn = "0277-9536",
publisher = "Elsevier",
}