The dynamic economic benefits of early life health interventions- the role of skills and opportunities

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Several studies have documented that the early life health endowment is predictive of later life earnings. We demonstrate this again, using historical data from America and Sweden. In both cases, we identify skill acquisition as a pathway. In a departure from most existing research, we show that realization of the full potential of an early life health improvement is contingent upon economic opportunities that facilitate the translation of skills into earnings. In America, we analyse the discovery of antibiotics in 1937, which led to a sharp improvement in the early life health endowment for all demographic groups. We show that this was mirrored in later-life earnings gains for all groups other than blacks in the South, for whom the return to investment in skills was cramped by unequal opportunities for quality schooling and quality jobs. In Sweden, we show that a pioneering postnatal health intervention implemented in 1931 led to better infant health, reflected in a population-level increase in earnings among eligible cohorts. However, the increase in earnings was entirely driven by women. We show that this is because job opportunities for women were growing more rapidly than for men at this time, driven by welfare state expansion creating jobs for teachers, nurses and midwives, who were predominantly women.

Speaker:

Professor Sonia Bhalotra is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, UK. She obtained an MPhil and DPhil from Oxford and a BSc Hons from Delhi. Her research has made contributions in the areas of health, gender and political economy. She is currently Principal Investigator on an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council 2021-2026, Co-Investigator ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at ISER Essex 2019-2024, Co-Investigator ESRC Project on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology at the Human Rights Centre Essex 2015-2021 and Co-Investigator on a CEDIL and NIH funded project 2020-2025. She is Fellow of the International Economic Association (2021-), Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2019-) and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research CEPR London (2019-).