Question

In the public debate it is often assumed that the widespread availability of fatty food is responsible for bad eating habits, obesity and cardiovascular diseases. However, there are large heterogeneities in the responses to the availability of fatty food and they remain unexplained even if one accounts for many socio-economic factors. What we try to do in this paper is to understand whether a temporary scarcity of a good in a certain period leads to a long run reaction later in life. More specifically, we focus on Italy and we study individuals that passed their childhood during World War II and they experienced meat scarcity. And we want to see whether these individuals when they grow up have a higher probability of eating meat every day. We also want to understand whether this long run reaction differs by gender and whether these effects afterwards persist to the next generation.

Method

To answer this question, we bring together information at the regional level on the local availability of meat with individual level information on eating habits, body mass index and other health related outcomes. We obtain regional level data by hand collecting information on the number of livestock, using the censuses and the annual statistics of agriculture in 1941-42 and in 1944-45. We then merge this data with survey data that allows us to observe, at the individual level, the eating habits and other health related outcomes. We proxy the availability of meat at the regional level using the decrease in the number of livestock that we observe. This is a good proxy of the local availability of meat for two reasons. First of all, during World War II in Italy, there was rationing. So there was a ration card with which people could acquire basic goods including meat in established quantities and these quantities were depending on the availability of the food. This is why many people had to rely on the black market to get more food but of course if there was not enough livestock then also the price in the black market will be very high and people wouldn't be able to get meat neither through rationing nor through the black market. So what we do in order to understand whether the scarcity of meat leads to overconsumption of meat later on is to exploit cohort and regional level variation in a difference-in-difference framework. What do we do? First we define the treated cohort as those individuals who passed their childhood during World War II. And we compare them to the control cohort who are the individuals who passed their childhood after World War II. But of course there are different individuals living in different regions that were exposed to a higher or lower meat scarcity. This method allows us to estimate the causal effect of meat scarcity during childhood on individual eating habits later in life.

Findings

Our key finding is that the temporary scarcity of meat early in life increases the probability of eating meat every day later on. We find also that this effect is particularly strong among females that were aged 0 to 2 during World War II. We provide suggestive evidence that this gender difference can be explained by the preferential treatment of parents towards sons. Going back to our historical data, we find that among children aged 2 years old during World War II, girls experienced larger losses in weight than boys. This is compatible with a possible story that parents were prioritizing sons over daughters in the allocation of the scarce quantity of meat. How can we explain the findings for children that were so young during World War II? One possibility is that it is a result of a compensatory investment by the parents. So when World War II finished, parents tried to offset the meat scarcity that their daughters experienced during World War II by overcompensating them with meat. Subsequently, these girls developed an increased desire for meat and started to consume it more and more. Given that meat is rich in fat, its overconsumption can have negative consequences on individual health. Indeed, we find that among females who passed their childhood during World War II in regions that were more exposed to meat scarcity, their body mass index is higher, they have a higher probability of being overweight and also of suffering from cardiovascular diseases. We provide two sets of evidence in favor of a behavioral mechanism. First of all, all the increase in body mass index that we find is due to increases in weight rather than decreases in height. This means that the behavioral mechanism is at work while a biological (that we cannot exclude) would more point towards drops in height. Second, we also use information on household level consumption and we see that in households with a treated female member, the share of food expenditure over total is higher. These two evidence together suggest that a behavioral mechanism is at work. We then extend our analysis to the next generation and we study the children of the mothers that were affected by meat scarcity during World War II. What we find is that overconsumption of meat persists also in the next generation. We also develop a theoretical model in order to give intuition to our empirical results. The model shows that the first generation that experienced meat scarcity acquires a habit and an increased desire for meat while the second generation that actually experienced meat abundance acquires a taste for meat that reinforces its consumption.

Relevance

Our research makes an important contribution to the literature but also has policy implications. First, while most of the literature that studies the effects of early life experiences focuses on biological mechanisms, we uncovered a behavioral mechanism. These mechanisms operate through overconsumption and through overcompensation of parents. And we saw that it can have adverse consequences on health later in life. In some cases, like in the one that we explained in this paper, the behavioral channel may dominate the biological one. This suggests that future research should take into consideration both channels. Our findings suggest that when policymakers want to make interventions or to implement taxes, they need to take into account these behavioral mechanisms and the long run effects. A temporary tax that is designed to actually decrease the consumption of a good may backfire in the future and have the inverse effects if it is not permanent.

Outlook

There are two possible avenues for future research. The first is to apply more widely models of habit formation when studying parental investment. The second is to try to directly measure compensatory investments by parents in order to better understand how people react to adverse shocks. All in all, a temporary shock in early life can have a persistent effect on preferences and attitudes of multiple generations. This transmission of attitudes may actually be a channel through which economic variables like consumption or savings significantly correlate among generations.