Human capital investments in a life-cycle perspective and across generations

该项目旨在衡量教育和早期生命健康干预对个人健康和社会经济成果的影响。分析的重点是现有证据不明确的方面，如教育对健康的影响和父母教育的影响，以及迄今鲜有证据产生的方面，如教育和幼儿保健干预措施之间的协同效应；影响不同世代的投资之间的协同效应；以及公共投资和父母反应之间的关系。为了确保观察到的关系不是由第三因素引起的，如儿童健康方面的差异，这可能会影响学校教育和其他以后的生活结果，但实际上是源于教育程度的差异，分析利用了20世纪上半叶实施的一系列历史性改革造成的学校教育和获得护理的差异。这些改革以不同的方式扩大了儿童的就学范围，或扩大了他们获得预防性保健的机会，其实施具有巨大的时间和区域差异。由于所产生的变化是制度性的，因此不受个人决定的影响，改革可被视为“自然实验”，理想地可用于衡量因果影响。这一设置还使我们能够解决基于公共干预的分析中通常存在的几个身份识别问题。为了进行分析，将以前未利用的历史数据来源与最近收集的个人信息结合在一起，使我们能够开发瑞典的数据库，其质量和覆盖范围是大多数其他国家无法企及的。

This project aims at measuring the effects of education and early life health interventions on individual health and socio-economic outcomes. The analysis focuses on aspects for which the existing evidence is ambiguous, like education effects on health and effects of parental education, as well as on aspects for which little evidence has been generated to date, such as synergy effects between educational and early-childhood health interventions; between investments affecting different generations; and the relationship between public investments and parental responses. In order to assure that the observed relationships are not caused by third factors, like differences in child health which may influence schooling as well as other later-life outcomes, but actually originate from differences in educational attainment, the analysis exploits variation in schooling and access to care caused by a series of historical reforms implemented during the first half of the 20th century. These reforms extended the schooling of children, or their access to preventative care, in different ways and their implementation was characterised by an enormous temporal and regional variation. Since the generated variation was of an institutional kind and therefore independent of individual decisions the reforms can be considered as “natural experiments” which are ideally exploitable for the measurement of causal effects. The setting also allows us to address several identification issues typically present in analyses based on public interventions. In order to conduct the analysis, previously unutilised historical data sources are combined with more recently collected individual-level information which enables us to exploit a database for Sweden of a quality and coverage out of reach for most other countries.