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

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Karlsson
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics ; Economic and Social History
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398217168

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants