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.

Note: Funding: There is no funding external body.

Declaration of Interests: This is a pure academic work and there are no competing interests from other parties

Ethics Approval Statement: The data are publicly available.

Keywords: famine, hunger, developmental origins, two-sample instrumental variable

JEL Classification: I12, J11, C21, C26