JESS Seminar: Birth in Times of War – An investigation of health, mortality and social class using historical clinical records

While World War II (WWII) is often employed as natural experiment to identify long-term effects of adverse early-life and prenatal conditions, little is known about the short-term effects. We estimate the short term impact of the onset of WWII on newborn health using a unique dataset of historical birth records. Furthermore we investigate the heterogeneity of this effect with respect to health at birth and for different social groups. Our data include detailed information on all births and miscarriages, which took place in Munich’s largest birth hospital between December 1937 and September 1941. While we do not find any effects on birth weight, perinatal mortality increases. The mortality effect is driven by live births and strongest for very low birth weight infants. A decline in quality of medical care is the most likely mechanism for our findings.