Announcement
The importance of early life conditions for health across the life course continues to be a very relevant topic of interest among scholars from many different backgrounds and disciplines. On March 20-21, 2014 MiCDA and ICPSR sponsored a workshop on the Long-run Impacts of Early Life Events IV: Evidence from Developed and Developing Economies to give leading researchers the opportunity to engage in a broad discussion of new findings and avenues for future research. The overall goals of the conference were to:
* Accelerate the pace of research on this topic, especially on papers that are relevant to understanding the causes of poverty and disadvantage in adulthood, and improve our understanding about the nature and pathways by which these effects arise.
* Raise awareness in the research and policy communities about the long-run impact of early life experiences and investments.
* Facilitate stronger communications and collaboration among researchers from various disciplines who are working on this topic.
The conference featured 12 paper and 8 poster presentations from a range of scientific disciplines, including economics, demography, sociology, epidemiology, and public health. The papers were diverse in terms of different types of exposures (poor nutrition, infectious diseases, lead), outcomes (hypertension, diabetes, educational attainment, income, longevity, sex composition at birth, cognitive impairment) and study design (birth cohorts, surveys, longitudinal data), geographic location (Africa, Asia, US, England, Europe, India, Latin America and the Caribbean, Netherlands, Taiwan, US), respondents (young adults, older adults, children) and possible policy implications (education spending in the US, interventions for children and mothers in low and middle income countries).