8
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Evidence on early-life income and late-life health from America's Dust Bowl era.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          In recent decades, elderly Americans have enjoyed enormous gains in longevity and reductions in disability. The causes of this progress remain unclear, however. This paper investigates the role of fetal programming, exploring how economic progress early in the 20th century might be related to declining disability today. Specifically, we match sudden unexpected economic changes experienced in utero in America's Dust Bowl during the Great Depression to unusually detailed individual-level information about old-age disability and chronic disease. We are unable to detect any meaningful relationship between early life factors and outcomes in later life. We conclude that, if such a relationship exists in the United States, it is most likely not a quantitatively important explanation for declining disability today.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
          Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
          0027-8424
          0027-8424
          Aug 14 2007
          : 104
          : 33
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Economics, Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research, Littauer Center, 1875 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. dcutler@harvard.edu
          Article
          0700035104
          10.1073/pnas.0700035104
          17686988
          1cb86276-0f97-43f9-a1f4-c4a2fbd1aad8
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article