Funding to new research project to CELE on childhood health and economic prospects

What are the long-term economic effects of early childhood health? This is the key question in this new 4 year research project that has just received NOK 9 million in funding from the Research Council of Norway.

15.01.2015 - Astri Kamsvåg

The research project is entitled "Intergenerational mobility, early health shocks and public policy", and aims to make inferences on the long-term effects and on the intergenerational persistence of these childhood health changes from a variety of perspectives.

On the one hand, these include negative (in utero) health shocks that result from increases in maternal stress or from exposure to a toxic environment. On the other hand, they also include policy-induced positive (in utero, neonatal or post-neonatal) health shocks through mechanisms such as disease eradication and the roll-out of mother and child health care centers.

In particular, the project will focus on how early childhood experiences, and their interaction with public policy, affect short-term and long-term cognitive, health and labor market outcomes both for the affected generation as well as their offspring.

The outcomes for the first generation are measured during the period when the Norwegian welfare state was established. This enables the researchers to examine the role of the introduction of the Norwegian welfare state on the outcomes of individuals who were growing up in this period. Long-term effects of several important public health policies in Norway starting in the 1930s will be analyzed.

The project, which is headed by Professor Kjell Gunnar Salvanes, aims to closely integrate young researchers from Bergen in a group of senior researchers, both from Bergen and abroad, working jointly on the same topics.

The call: Research Council of Norway in the Humanities and Social Sciences programme

FRIPRO is an open competitive arena for all research areas and disciplines, where there are no thematic guidelines and no requirements relating to the applicability or immediate utility of the research.

CELE