World War II Blues

Abstract

There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching levels unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is also on the rise. We examine the causal impact of early life exposure to warfare on long–term mental health, using novel data on the amount of bombs dropped in German cities by Allied Air Forces during World War II (WWII) and the German Socio-economic Panel. Our identification strategy leverages a generalized difference-indifferences design, exploiting the plausibly exogenous city-by-cohort variation in the bombing intensity experienced by the former West German cities during the war as a quasi- experiment. We find that cohorts who were five years old or younger during WWII have significantly poorer mental health outcomes later in life, when they are in their late 50s to 70s. Specifically, an increase of one standard deviation in the bombing intensity experienced during WWII is associated with about a 10 percent decline in an individual’s long–term standardized mental health score. This effect is equivalent to a 16.2 percent increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with clinical depression. Our investigation suggests that factors such as the increased burden on the healthcare system, and economic losses during WWII exacerbate the adverse impact of bombing exposure on long–term mental health. Conversely, war relief funds transferred to municipalities following the war have a mitigating impact.