| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w30284 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 30284 |
| World War II Blues: The Long\u2013lasting Mental Health Effect of Childhood Trauma | |
| Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel; Erdal Tekin; Belgi Turan | |
| 发表日期 | 2022-07-25 |
| 出版年 | 2022 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching to levels unprecedented since the end of Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is also on the rise. We examine the causal impact of early life exposure to warfare on long–term mental health, using novel data on the amount of bombs dropped in German cities by Allied Air Forces during World War II (WWII) and German Socioeconomic Panel. Our identification strategy leverages a generalized difference-in-differences design, exploiting the plausibly exogenous variation in the bombing intensity suffered by German cities during the war as a quasi-experiment. We find that cohorts younger than age five at the onset of WWII or those born during the war are in significantly worse mental health later in life when they are between ages late 50s and 70s. Specifically, an increase of one-standard deviation in the bombing intensity experienced during WWII is associated with about a 10 percent decline in an individual’s long–term standardized mental health score. This effect is equivalent to a 16.8 percent increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with clinical depression. Our analysis also reveals that this impact is most pronounced among the youngest children including those who might have been in-utero at some point during the war. Our investigation further suggests that measures capturing the extent of destruction in healthcare infrastructure, the increase in the capacity burden of the healthcare system, and wealth loss during WWII exacerbate the adverse impact of bombing exposure on long–term mental health, while the size of war relief funds transferred to municipalities following the war has a mitigating impact. Our findings are robust across a variety of empirical checks and specifications. With the mental health impact of childhood exposure to warfare persisting well into the late stages of life, the global burden of mental illness may be aggravated for many years to come. Our findings imply that prioritizing children and a long–term horizon in public health planning and response may be critical to mitigating the adverse mental health consequences of exposure to armed conflict. |
| 主题 | Public Economics ; National Fiscal Issues ; Health, Education, and Welfare ; Health |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w30284 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/587957 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel,Erdal Tekin,Belgi Turan. World War II Blues: The Long\u2013lasting Mental Health Effect of Childhood Trauma. 2022. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w30284.pdf（730KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
除非特别说明，本系统中所有内容都受版权保护，并保留所有权利。
