In January 2006, the Dutch government implemented a pension reform that substantially reduced the public pension wealth of workers born in 1950 or later. At the same time, a tax-facilitated savings plan was introduced that substantially reduced the saving costs of all workers, irrespective of...

We use newly collected individual-level hunger recall information from the China Family Panel Survey to estimate the causal effect of undernourishment on later-life health. We develop a Two-Sample Instrumental Variable (TSIV) estimator that can deal with heterogeneous samples. We find a...

The aim of this study is to assess the effects of economic conditions in early life on cause-specific mortality during adulthood. The analyses are performed on a unique historical sample of 14,520 Dutch individuals born in 1880-1918, who are followed throughout life. The economic conditions in...

The Dutch Hunger Winter (1944/45) is the most-studied famine in the literature on long-run effects of malnutrition in utero. Its temporal and spatial demarcations are clear, it was severe, it was not anticipated, and nutritional conditions in society were favorable and stable before and after...

The magnitude of the effect that health has on the retirement decision has long been studied. We examine the reverse relationship, whether or not retirement has a direct impact on later-life health. In order to identify the causal relationship, we use unexpected early retirement window offers to...

We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

This paper considers determinants of physical-functional limitations in daily-life activities at high ages. Specifically, we quantify the extent to which the impact of adverse life events on this outcome is larger in case of exposure to adverse economic conditions early in life. Adverse life...

This paper examines the effects of a massive salt iodization program on human capital formation of school-aged children in China. Exploiting province and time variation we find strong positive effects on cognition for girls and no effects for boys. For non-cognitive skills we find the opposite....

We examine the targeting effects of increased scrutiny in the screening of Disability Insurance (DI) applications using exogenous variation in screening induced by a policy reform. The reform raised DI application costs and revealed more information about the true disability status of applicants...

This paper investigates the impact of parental education on child health outcomes. To identify the causal effect we explore exogenous variation in parental education induced by a schooling reform in 1947, which raised the minimum school leaving age in the UK. Findings based on data from the...