2018/06/01 by Brian Beach, Joseph P. Ferrie, Martín Saavedra · 39 citations
Social Sciences · Medicine · Health Professions · #Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences #Birth, Development, and Health #Global Health Care Issues #Microdata (statistics) #Pandemic #Influenza pandemic #In utero #Socioeconomic status #Demographic economics #Census #Demography #Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) #Economic growth #Fetus #Biology #Economics #Medicine #Pregnancy #Infectious disease (medical specialty) #Sociology #Population #Disease
paper · pdf · doi:10.3386/w24725
published in National Bureau of Economic Research
openalex publication_date 2018/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
argues that in-utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic lowered socioeconomic status in adulthood, whereas subsequent work has argued that exposed cohorts may have been selected. We bring new evidence on the lasting impact of in-utero exposure to the pandemic. Linking census microdata to WWII enlistment records and city-level influenza data allows us to adopt an empirical approach that exploits pandemic intensity as a source of identifying variation. We show that pandemic intensity is less related to parental characteristics, suggesting this approach can more credibly be interpreted as causal. Our results indicate that inutero exposure to the pandemic lowered high school graduation rates.