TY - JOUR AU - Lin, Ming-Jen AU - Liu, Elaine M TI - Does in utero Exposure to Illness Matter? The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in Taiwan as a Natural Experiment JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 20166 PY - 2014 Y2 - May 2014 DO - 10.3386/w20166 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20166 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20166.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Ming-Jen Lin Department of Economics National Taiwan University No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd. Taipei 10617, Taiwan E-Mail: mjlin@ntu.edu.tw Elaine M. Liu Department of Economics University of Houston McElhinney Hall 223D Houston, TX 77004 Tel: 713/743-3861 Fax: 713/743-3798 E-Mail: emliu@uh.edu AB - This paper tests whether in utero conditions affect long-run developmental outcomes using the 1918 influenza pandemic in Taiwan as a natural experiment. Combining several historical and current datasets, we find that cohorts in utero during the pandemic are shorter as children/adolescents and less educated compared to other birth cohorts. We also find that they are more likely to have serious health problems including kidney disease, circulatory and respiratory problems, and diabetes in old age. Despite possible positive selection on health outcomes due to high infant mortality rates during this period (18 percent), our paper finds a strong negative impact of in utero exposure to influenza. ER -