台风的长期阴影：产前暴露与成年期心理健康

This paper examines how poor in utero conditions caused by severe typhoons affect psychological well-being later in life. We exploit variation in the timing and location of severe typhoon landfalls. Our design compares individuals with higher expected fetal exposure in landfall counties to those with no such exposure. A one-unit increase in expected in utero exposure raises the likelihood of an adult mental illness diagnosis by 2.2 percentage points, or 11 percent relative to the mean. The incidence of mood disorders such as depression and the use of antidepressants has risen by more than 50 percent. The adverse effects are concentrated among women. In a fully interacted model, we reject equality of the male and female effects for our main outcomes. This gender gap is not driven by differential healthcare-seeking behavior. We discuss several non-mutually exclusive mechanisms that could generate a genuinely female-concentrated effect, including sex-specific fetal programming and mortality selection.