Early Life Circumstance and Adult Mental Health

By Achyuta R. Adhvaryu, James Fenske, Anant Nyshadham. Journal of Political Economy, 2019

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies with circumstance in early life. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing regions relative to those born in other regions. Impacts on related personality traits are consistent with this result. Maternal nutrition, reinforcing childhood investments, and adult circumstance are likely operative channels of impact.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2e35e527224a4ea9da540451b636054cd102411

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In Safety Research

1. Gautam Rao
2. Frank Schilbach

Citations in the corpus

• Childhood Circumstances and Adult Outcomes: Act II (2018, unknown): “The studies by Loken, Mogstad, and Wiswall (2012) and Adhvaryu et al. (2016) examine the oil boom in Norway and a cocoa price boom in Ghana, respectively.”
• Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms (2020, background): “…mental health costs; in Ghana, a decrease in crop prices by 1 SD at an individual ’ s time of birth was found to increase incidence of anxiety or depression in adult-hood by 50%, associating with maternal nutrition, breastfeeding duration, vaccination rates, and improved adult health ( 60 ).”