Health Shocks and Human Capital Accumulation: The Case of Spanish Flu in Italian Regions
Health Shocks and Human Capital Accumulation: The Case of Spanish Flu in Italian Regions
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DOI：
10.1080/00343404.2015.1039975
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发表时间：
2016-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Percoco, Marco
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Percoco, Marco
健康对经济发展的影响是经济学文献中一个激烈辩论的问题，大多数学者支持疾病传播不利于发展的观点。在这方面，大流行病是一个重要的研究案例，因为它们具有外源性，比疟疾或天花等其他情况更清楚地确定疾病对发展的影响。本文关注的是意大利的西班牙流感，这是因大流行而死亡率最高的国家之一。通过利用死亡率的区域差异，并侧重于认知能力的胎儿起源的假设，流感暴露的长期后果的人力资本积累的估计。1918- 1920年出生的人群平均受教育年限减少了0.3-0.4年，这一结果表明，健康冲击通过人力资本积累率的变化对区域生产率产生了微小但持续的影响。
The impact of health on economic development is a hotly debated issue in the economics literature, with most scholars supporting the idea that the diffusion of diseases is detrimental to development. In this context, pandemics are an important case study given their exogenous nature, which makes identification of the impact of diseases on development clearer than in other cases such as malaria or smallpox. This paper focuses on Spanish flu in Italy, one of the countries with the highest mortality rate due to the pandemic. By exploiting the regional variation in mortality and focusing on the hypothesis of the foetal origins of cognitive abilities, the long-run consequences of influenza exposure in terms of human capital accumulation are estimated. An average reduction of 0.3-0.4 years of schooling for the cohort born in 1918-20 is found. This result points to a small but persisting effect of health shocks on regional productivity through a variation in the rate of accumulation of human capital.