Adverse Childhood Experiences and Outcomes Later in Life: Evidence from SHARE Countries

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate whether exposure to adverse experiences during childhood such as physical and emotional abuse affects a set of health and socio-economic outcomes across the lifespan using recent European data from SHARE (The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe). The novelty of our approach consists in exploiting the recently published data on adverse childhood experiences for 19 SHARE countries, which enables us to account for country-specific heterogeneity and investigate the long-run effects of exposure to early-life adverse circumstances on different adult outcomes. Our results highlight a negative long-term effect of exposure to adverse childhood experiences -ACEs on risky behaviour such as smoking, as well as on socio-economic outcomes like unemployment and family dissolution.

Keywords: Adverse Childhood Experiences, Smoking Behaviour, Unemployment, Family Dissolution

JEL Classification: H4, I12