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

In this paper, we investigate whether exposure to adverse experiences during childhood such as physical and emotional abuse affects a set of health and socio-economic outcomes across the lifespan using recent European data from SHARE (The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) . The novelty of our approach consists in exploiting the recently published data on adverse childhood experiences for 19 SHARE countries, which enables us to account for country-specific heterogeneity and investigate the long-run effects of exposure to early- life adverse circumstances on different adult outcomes. Our results highlight a negatiive long-term effect of exposure to adverse childhood experiences -ACEs on risky behaviour such as smoking, as well as on socio-economic outcomes like unemployment and family dissolution.