Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Series: Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers
Creation-Date: 2021-06-19
Number: 21-054/V
Author-Name: Zichen Deng
Author-Workplace-Name: Norwegian School of Economics
Author-Name: Maarten Lindeboom
Author-Workplace-Name: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Title: Early-life Famine Exposure, Hunger Recall and Later-life Health
Abstract: We use newly collected individual-level hunger recall information from the China Family Panel Survey to estimate the causal effect of undernourishment on later-life health. We develop a Two-Sample Instrumental Variable (TSIV) estimator that can deal with heterogeneous samples. We find a non-linear relationship between the Great Chinese Famine and hunger recall. The non-linearity in famine exposure may explain the variation in the famine’s effect on later life health found in previous studies. We also find that exposure to famine-induced hunger early in life leads to worse health among females fifty years later. This effect is larger than the reduced-form effect found in previous studies. For males, we find no impact.
Classification-JEL: I12, J11, C21, C26
Keywords: famine, hunger, developmental origins, two-sample instrumental variable
File-URL: https://papers.tinbergen.nl/21054.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
File-Size: 448016 bytes
Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20210054