Early Life Conditions, Marital Status, and Mortality

It is well-known that early life conditions as well as marital status a¤ect health and mortality later in life. In this paper we analyze the interplay between these determinants of high-age mortality. First, we study the impact of economic conditions early in life on the individual rate of getting married. Secondly, we examine the protective e¤ect of marriage and, in particular, to what extent this protective e¤ect depends on conditions early in life. The results shed light on the use of marriage as a compensatory device in case of adverse early-life conditions. We use business cycle conditions in early years of life as an exogenous indicator of early-life conditions. The endogeneity of marriage calls for a simultaneous analysis that allows for selectivity on unobservables. We use individual data records from Dutch registers of birth, marriage and death certi…cates, covering an exceptionally long observation window from 1815-2000. These are merged with historical data on macroeconomic and health indicators. The semi-parametric empirical analysis applies the timingof-events approach in which bivariate duration models with unobserved heterogeneity and causal e¤ects are estimated. It turns out that conditions around birth as well as around the school ages are important for marital status and mortality. The results are strikingly di¤erent across gender. Men on average enjoy a protective e¤ect of marriage on mortality, and this e¤ect increases with age. Women born in economic booms gain from marriage during childbearing ages, but women born in recessions su¤er a substantial negative e¤ect on life expectancy during these years. Keywords: death, longevity, recession, life expectancy, lifetimes, marriage, conjugal bereavement, timing of events, selectivity, health. JEL codes: I12, J14, E32, N33, N13, C41. We are grateful to Andrew Chesher, Erik Plug, Maarten Lindeboom, and Manuel Arellano, for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. We also thank other participants at the 3rd meeting of the Microdata RTN at CEMFII, Madrid, for their useful input. Thanks to Marta López for help with the preparation of the data. Sumedha Gupta thanks Ronald Woltho¤ for his continued help throughout this work. The “Historical Sample of the Netherlands Dataset release UZF.02” was kindly provided by the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam. The authors acknowledge …nancial support from the EU 6th Research Framework and Marie Curie Research Training Actions.