Ingrid van Dijk
Associate senior lecturer
Short Lives. The impact of parental death on early life mortality and height in the Netherlands 1860-1940
Author
Summary, in English
We investigate how experiencing parental death in infancy, childhood, or adolescence affected individuals’ health using two distinct measures: mortality before age 20 and young adult height. Using two complementary indicators of health enables us to gain more insights into processes of selection and the scarring of health. Employing nationally representative data for the Netherlands for the 1850-1940 period, we analyze the survival of roughly 36,000 boys and girls using Cox proportional hazard models, and the stature of more than 4,000 young adult men using linear regression models. Results show that losing a parent, and particularly a mother, at an early age (0-1 or 1-5) was related to strongly increased mortality. At the same time, we find no evidence that losing a parent at these ages affected stature in young adulthood. For boys, experiencing maternal death between ages five and 12 was strongly associated with a shorter young adult height, while we did not find evidence for an association between experiencing paternal death and shorter stature. We conclude that stature may not be a particularly good measure of the effects of early-life adversity if the health shock greatly increases mortality, as these effects create potential issues of health selection.
Department/s
- Department of Economic History
- Centre for Economic Demography
Publishing year
2022-07-30
Language
English
Publication/Series
Demography
Document type
Preprint
Publisher
SocArXiv
Topic
- Public Health, Global Health, Social Medicine and Epidemiology
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1533-7790