I've spent some time on this blog talking about the influence of fetal and early childhood events on later health and economic outcomes (see, for example, here). Recently, I was scouring the web for some of the medical literature on this subject, and came across this great website. The site summarizes the seminal body of work conducted by David Barker and colleagues on the fetal origins hypothesis, providing non-technical summaries of a variety of research strands and key citations to the most important papers written on the subject. Definitely check it out.
As I mentioned in the linked post above, the fetal programming literature has gained great currency among economists. However, little work has been done on fetal origins in the context of other investments and events and individual receives or faces in the course of his or her life cycle. James Heckman's recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences synthesizes these literatures, linking health, cognition and other skills in the process (you can find a more general statement of Heckman's research agenda here). It's a great read that highlights the fact that there is a great deal of research required to fully understand and characterize many aspects of human capital accumulation. (Self-promotion: this is good news for me, as much of my dissertation deals with these topics.)
1 comment:
heh, you would have loved David Canning's lecture at the Core seminar yesterday.... it was all about this stuff.
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