Skills, early-life environment and health in adulthood

Nature, nurture and their integrated effect on health over the lifespan are historically widely studied in economics. Some of the main factors that have come into play over decades of research are skills, in utero and early-life conditions, and education.  This thesis investigates all these factors and their link to objective health outcomes. In Chapter 2 we investigate the association between education, by level of intelligence, and disease-specific medication use in adulthood. In Chapter 3 we estimate the causal effect of macroeconomic conditions around the time of birth on the occurrence of type-2 diabetes later in life. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the computation of clustered standard errors in the case in which there are few highly unbalanced clusters. Such computations become relevant in the presence of variables that are constant within clusters, such as policy variables. Data clustered in few highly unbalanced clusters and variables constant within clusters are recurrent in health economics and therefore the results of this chapter might be useful for research in the field of health economics.

Dissertation: http://hdl.handle.net/11370/ad1d6409-c6d8-418e-b869-0d985082f283