Dissertation Teaser

Here are the first few bars of my dissertation's introduction. (I'm planning to submit the thesis by March 16):

There are wide disparities in health and socioeconomic outcomes both within and across countries. Recent work in economics and epidemiology suggests that differences in conditions faced by individuals very early in their lives may help explain a substantive portion of these gaps. In particular, exposure to a variety of shocks and investments in utero and in early childhood is strongly associated with differences in morbidity and mortality risk, cognition, and socioeconomic status over the rest of the life cycle. There is evidence that the effects of these shocks extend across generations, as well. Work from the biomedical sciences suggests that these long-run and intergenerational impacts may be driven by complex biological processes, where early life environmental conditions induce adaptive changes in gene expression and physiological processes that persist into adulthood. While such changes may allow individuals to survive environmental insults in the short run, they may be deleterious to health, mental capacity and productivity in the longer-run.

The literature on the persistence of early life conditions has grown considerably in the last decade. However, many important questions remain unanswered and warrant research attention. First, the policy implications of much of the literature on early life shocks are not obvious. While studies of the long-run effects of events such as famines, droughts, pandemics, recessions and other plausibly exogenous shocks allow for more confidence in inferring causality, their results do not readily suggest appropriate directions for policy intervention. Second, outside of evidence from animal studies, little is known about the mechanisms underlying these long-run effects, particularly in the context of intergenerational impacts and cross-generational correlations in health, more broadly. Finally, there is little consensus on the extent to which disparities in early life conditions can account for the gaps in health, human capital and economic status at various points in the life course and the extent to which such impacts can modulated by investments and conditions faced later in life. This dissertation attempts to address these gaps in the literature and primarily focuses on developing countries, for which evidence on the long-run effects of early life conditions is relatively scant.