Do conditions in early life affect old-age mortality directly and indirectly? Evidence form 19th-century rural Sweden.
Previous research has shown that the disease load experienced during the birth year, measured as the infant mortality rate, had a significant influence on old-age mortality in nineteenth-century rural Sweden. We know that children born in years with very high rates of infant mortality, due to outbreaks of smallpox or whooping cough, and who still survived to adulthood and married, faced a life len