Adverse childhood experiences and outcomes later in life: Evidence from SHARE countries

In thi s paper , we investigate whether exposure to adverse exper iences during childhood such as physical and emotional abuse affects a set of heal th and socio-economic outcomes across the l ifespan using recent European data from SHARE (The Survey of Heal th, Ageing and Ret irement in Europe) . The novel ty of our approach consi s ts in exploi ting the recently published data on adverse childhood experiences for 19 SHARE countries, which enables us to account for country-specific heterogenei ty and investigate the long-run effects of exposure to ear ly- l i fe adverse c ircumstances on different adul t outcomes. Our resul ts highl ight a negat ive long-term effect of exposure to adverse chi ldhood experiences -ACEs on r isky behaviour such as smoking, as well as on socio-economic outcomes l i ke unemployment and fami l y di ssolution.