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In this article, I argue that research on social stratification, on intergenerational transmission of inequalities, and on the theory of factor payments and wage determination will be strengthened by studying the role played by early childhood health. I show that the inclusion of such afactor requires researchers to integrate theories in each of these fields with new theories linking early childhood health conditions and events that occur at later stages in the life course of individuals, particularly physical and mental health as well as disability and mortality. The empirical evidence I gather shows that early childhood health matters for the achievement of or social accession to, adult social class positions. Even if the magnitude of associations is not overwhelming, it is not weaker than that found between adult social accession and other, more conventional and better-studied individual characteristics, such as educational attainment. It is very likely that the evidence presented in this article grossly underplays the importance of early childhood health for adult socioeconomic achievement.

Robust empirical evidence supports the idea that embryonic and, more generally, intrauterine disruptions induced by the 1918-flu pandemic had long-term consequences on adult health status and other conditions. In this paper we assess the 1918-flu long-term effects not just of in utero exposure but also during infancy and early childhood. A unique set of events that took place in Puerto Rico during 1918-1919 generated conditions of a \"double quasi-natural experiment\". We exploit these conditions to empirically identify effects of exposure to the 1918 flu pandemic and those of the devastation left by an earthquake-tsunami that struck the island in 1918. Because the earthquake-tsunami affected mostly the Western coast of the island whereas early (in utero and postnatal) exposure to the flu was restricted to those born in the interval 1917-1920, we use geographic variation to identify the effects of the quake and timing of birth variation to identify those of the flu. We benefit from availability of information on markers of nutritional status in a nationally representative sample of individuals aged 75 and older in 2002. We make two contributions. First, unlike most fetal-origins research that singles out early nutritional status as a determinant of adult health, we hypothesize that the 1918 flu damaged the nutritional status of adult survivors who, at the time of the flu, were in utero or infants. Second, we target markers of nutritional status largely set when the adult survivors were infants and young children. Estimates of effects of the pandemic are quite large mostly among females and those who were exposed to the earthquake-tsunami. Impacts of the flu in areas less affected by the earthquake are smaller but do vary by area flu severity. These findings constitute empirical evidence supporting the conjecture that effects of the 1918 flu and/or the earthquake are associated not just with disruption experienced during the fetal period but also postnatally.

In this paper, we use new models to convert subjective expectations elicited from individual responses into conditional survival functions. We also estimate the effects of individual characteristics and assess the impact of health shocks on individual updates of subjective expectations. We use Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data from 1992 to 2006. By and large, our results confirm past empirical findings, but also identify patterns not documented in previous research. We show that the subjective probabilities are remarkably close to the results of actual life tables constructed from observed data, that whites underestimate their survival chances more than blacks, that women underestimate their survival chances more than men, and that the subjective underestimation of conditional survival increases with age in all population subgroups. We find significant differences in the survival outlooks of the original HRS cohort and a more recent HRS cohort (1992 versus 2004). These differences persist after introducing suitable controls. The observed mortality differentials between smokers and non-smokers, obese and non-obese individuals, and high-education and low-education groups are quite close to those of these subgroups’ subjective survival expectations. Finally, we find large updating effects that result from recent health shocks on subjective expectations.

Grip strength, walking speed, chair rising and standing balance time are objective measures of physical capability that characterise current health and predict survival in older populations. Socioeconomic position (SEP) in childhood may influence the peak level of physical capability achieved in early adulthood, thereby affecting levels in later adulthood. We have undertaken a systematic review with meta-analyses to test the hypothesis that adverse childhood SEP is associated with lower levels of objectively measured physical capability in adulthood. Relevant studies published by May 2010 were identified through literature searches using EMBASE and MEDLINE. Unpublished results were obtained from study investigators. Results were provided by all study investigators in a standard format and pooled using random-effects meta-analyses. 19 studies were included in the review. Total sample sizes in meta-analyses ranged from N = 17,215 for chair rise time to N = 1,061,855 for grip strength. Although heterogeneity was detected, there was consistent evidence in age adjusted models that lower childhood SEP was associated with modest reductions in physical capability levels in adulthood: comparing the lowest with the highest childhood SEP there was a reduction in grip strength of 0.13 standard deviations (95% CI: 0.06, 0.21), a reduction in mean walking speed of 0.07 m/s (0.05, 0.10), an increase in mean chair rise time of 6% (4%, 8%) and an odds ratio of an inability to balance for 5s of 1.26 (1.02, 1.55). Adjustment for the potential mediating factors, adult SEP and body size attenuated associations greatly. However, despite this attenuation, for walking speed and chair rise time, there was still evidence of moderate associations. Policies targeting socioeconomic inequalities in childhood may have additional benefits in promoting the maintenance of independence in later life.

In this article, we test for four potential explanations of the Hispanic Health Paradox (HHP): the \"salmon bias,\" emigration selection, and sociocultural protection originating in either destination or sending country. To reduce biases related to attrition by return migration typical of most U.S.-based surveys, we combine data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study in Mexico and the U. S. National Health Interview Survey to compare self-reported diabetes, hypertension, current smoking, obesity, and self-rated health among Mexican-born men ages 50 and older according to their previous U.S. migration experience, and U.S.-born Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. We also use height, a measure of health during childhood, to bolster some of our tests. We find an immigrant advantage relative to non-Hispanic whites in hypertension and, to a lesser extent, obesity. We find evidence consistent with emigration selection and the salmon bias in height, hypertension, and self-rated health among immigrants with less than 15 years of experience in the United States; we do not find conclusive evidence consistent with sociocultural protection mechanisms. Finally, we illustrate that although ignoring return migrants when testing for the HHP and its mechanisms, as well as for the association between U.S. experience and health, exaggerates these associations, they are not fully driven by return migration-related attrition.

The impact of fertility decline on economic development remains central to population studies. Recent scholarship emphasizes parental investment in education as a mediator. We further develop the theoretical foundation, and empirical evidence, for the role of child health—specifically how fertility changes promote children’s physical and cognitive development and thereby complement human capital accumulation through educational gains. We test this using a two-generation model applied to Indonesian longitudinal data from 1993 to 2015. Characteristics of modern fertility regimes—older maternal ages, longer interpregnancy intervals, and lower average birth orders—generally benefit offspring cognitive development and schooling. We estimate that family planning expansion, and the resulting shift in fertility traits, induced an average increase of 0.34 years of offspring educational attainment by age 18 years. Maximal maternal educational and family planning expansion would jointly produce a 1.12-year gain, including 0.20 years more directly attributable to fertility shifts. Evidence is strengthened in parallel simulations from models of within-mother shifts, in which fertility shifts resulted in a 0.16-year gain in offspring schooling. Findings contribute new evidence for the rounding effects of women’s education and family planning expansion on human capital formation through child health within families and across generations.

BACKGROUND There is growing empirical evidence supporting theories of developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD). However, the implications of DOHaD conjectures for aggregate population patterns of human disease, disability, mortality, and aging are poorly understood. OBJECTIVE We empirically test two predictions derived from a formal model of aggregate population-level impacts of DOHaD. This model predicts that populations potentially influenced by delayed effects should experience singularities in their adult mortality patterns that can be empirically detected from aggregate data. METHODS We test predictions using a large mortality database for populations in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, spanning nearly one hundred years of mortality history. RESULTS Results are consistent, within explicit bounds of uncertainty, with expected patterns. We find that younger cohorts in countries whose mortality decline starts more recently experience deceleration in survival gains at older ages, attenuation of the rate of aging at older ages, and a decline in the association between early childhood and adult mortality. CONCLUSIONS Results point to the importance of adverse early conditions for human longevity. Future research should shed light on the impact on morbidity, disability, and healthy life expectancy. CONTRIBUTION To our knowledge this is the first time that implications of DOHaD conjectures for populations' mortality patterns are formulated precisely and empirically tested with aggregate population data.

We test a conjecture to explain Turkey’s decades long underachievement in early child mortality improvements. We argue that it is largely a consequence of cultural barriers to embrace available modern medical technology and health care practices. The empirical test rests on a reformulation of Coale’s Ready-Willing-Able (RWA) framework (1973) to explain fertility changes making it suitable to understand mortality changes. We employ a Structural Equation Model (SEM) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) spanning 1993 to 2013, and estimate basic parameters of the reformulated framework. These are then used to classify mothers into four categories representing subgroups with different configurations of RWA dimensions and different probabilities of adopting modern medical practices. We find that observed behaviors in these subgroups are consistent with RWA expectations. In addition, we find that an important contributor to Turkey’s lagging mortality decline is a population distribution biased toward groups more reticent to adopt modern health care, not to their availability or accessibility.

Previous research has suggested that incarceration has negative implications for individuals’ well-being, health, and mortality. Most of these studies, however, have not followed former prisoners over an extended period and into older adult ages, when the risk of health deterioration and mortality is the greatest. Contributing to this literature, this study is the first to employ the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to estimate the long-run association between individual incarceration and mortality over nearly 40 years. We also supplement those analyses with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). We then use these estimates to investigate the implications of the U.S. incarceration regime and the post-1980 incarceration boom for the U.S. health and mortality disadvantage relative to industrialized peer countries (the United Kingdom).

Increasing levels of obesity could compromise future gains in life expectancy in low- and high- income countries. Although excess mortality associated with obesity and, more generally, higher levels of body mass index (BMI) have been investigated in the United States, there is little research about the impact of obesity on mortality in Latin American countries, where very the rapid rate of growth of prevalence of obesity and overweight occur jointly with poor socioeconomic conditions. The aim of this article is to assess the magnitude of excess mortality due to obesity and overweight in Mexico and the United States. For this purpose, we take advantage of two comparable data sets: the Health and Retirement Study 2000 and 2004 for the United States, and the Mexican Health and Aging Study 2001 and 2003 for Mexico. We find higher excess mortality risks among obese and overweight individuals aged 60 and older in Mexico than in the United States. Yet, when analyzing excess mortality among different socioeconomic strata, we observe greater gaps by education in the United States than in Mexico. We also find that although the probability of experiencing obesity-related chronic diseases among individuals with high BMI is larger for the U.S. elderly, the relative risk of dying conditional on experiencing these diseases is higher in Mexico.