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alikapon.bsky.social
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New paper finally published! Using data on 78 million births from 15 countries, we found that babies conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic have a different parental socioeconomic composition than expected had the pandemic not occurred. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
@natcomms.nature.com @helsinki.fi
Screenshot of the title and abstract: Parental socioeconomic composition of birth cohorts changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic offers opportunities to study effects of in-utero and early life exposure to environmental changes. However, inferences from such studies may be flawed if the pandemic has changed the socioeconomic composition of parents. Analysing over 77.9 million live births from 15 countries, we estimate changes in the socioeconomic composition of the cohort born between December 2020 and December 2021 using interrupted time series analysis. We find that, compared with their counterfactual compositions, the December 2020-December 2021 birth cohort has a higher proportion of babies born to socioeconomically advantaged parents in Austria, England, Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Wales, and the United States while we observe the opposite change for Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. These changes in cohort composition may cause between-cohort differences in life course outcomes that are influenced by parental socioeconomic circumstances even if early life exposure to the pandemic had no direct effect on this birth cohort. Figure 4 in the article. Figure caption: The black dots are percentage-point differences derived from the estimated mean counterfactual number of live births using interrupted time series Poisson regressions on the number of live births. 95% confidence intervals presented as horizontal lines around the point estimates are estimated using a three-step approach (see method section). Estimates are based on 596,276 live births for Austria; 19,995,228 for Brazil; 4,329,577 for Colombia; 413,903 for Denmark; 1,965,574 for Ecuador; 4,391,999 for England; 330,063 for Finland; 12,876,945 for Mexico; 1,167,024 for the Netherlands; 343,379 for Scotland; 134,874 for South Australia; 2,229,935 for Spain; 758,034 for Sweden; 22,306,054 for the United States; 216,797 for Wales. For Spain, only births with maternal age over 25 are included (see methods and suppl. material). Quintiles of equivalised household income and area deprivation are abbreviated by the letter Q. Q5 (highest income, lowest deprivation) denotes the fifth quintile, Q4 the fourth quintile, and so forth. For countries, where only parental educational attainment was available, “Post-Second./ Tert.” denotes post-secondary or tertiary educational attainment, “Upper Second.” denotes upper secondary educational attainment, “Lower Second.” denotes lower secondary educational attainment, and “Prim.” denotes primary educational attainment.
January 5, 2026 at 12:28 PM