Childhood Circumstances and Adult Outcomes: Act II

By D. Almond, Janet Currie, Valentina Duque. Journal of Economic Literature, 2018

852 citations recorded by the source corpus.

That prenatal events can have life-long consequences is now well established. Nevertheless, research on the fetal origins hypothesis is flourishing and has expanded to include the early childhood (postnatal) environment. Why does this literature have a “second act?” We summarize the major themes and contributions driving the empirical literature since our 2011 reviews, and try to interpret the literature in light of an overarching conceptual framework about how human capital is produced early in life. One major finding is that relatively mild shocks in early life can have substantial negative impacts, but that the effects are often heterogeneous reflecting differences in child endowments, budget constraints, and production technologies. Moreover, shocks, investments, and interventions can interact in complex ways that are only beginning to be understood. Many advances in our knowledge are due to increasing accessibility of comprehensive administrative data that allow events in early life to be linked to long-term outcomes. Yet, we still know relatively little about the interval between, and thus about whether it would be feasible to identify and intervene with affected individuals at some point between early life and adulthood. We do know enough, however, to be able to identify some interventions that hold promise for improving child outcomes in early life and throughout the life course. (JEL I12, J13, J16, Q51, Q53)

Subfields: Gender Studies, Management Science and Operations Research, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99ef63b8669eafdcb51865170f4e8ab78ab3a1be

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Citations in the corpus

Intergenerational and Intragenerational Externalities of the Perry Preschool Project (2019, neutral): “Another large literature in social science (Almond et al., 2018; Currie and Almond, 2011; Heckman, 2008) points to the role of family structure and family resources in shaping children’s outcomes.”
Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries (2019, background): “Prior work shows that increases in government transfers that generate net increases in resources lead to improvements in health (e.g., reviewed in Almond et al. 2018).”
The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes (2019, neutral): “This paper was edited by James J. Heckman. removing children from abusive homes 1921 andCurrie 2011;Heckman, Pinto, and Savelyev 2013; Heckman andMosso 2014; Elango et al. 2015; Almond, Currie, and Duque 2018).”
The Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool in Boston (2021, positive): “A substantial body of evidence establishes that early life deﬁcits have persistent negative effects on lifetime well-being (see Knudsen et al. 2006; Almond, Currie, and Duque 2018).”