Pandemics & Society Webinar 23 April, “Scarring, selection, interaction: Chasing long-run effects of societal crises with historical individual level data”
For the eleventh Pandemics & Society Seminar of our Spring 2026 series we are pleased to welcome Sakari Saaritsa & Jarmo Peltola (University of Helsinki). The seminar will be held on Thursday, 23 April at the normal time (16:00 CEST). More information about our speakers and the presentation is below. You can sign up for email notifications about the seminar series, including the Zoom details, here.
About the talk:
Research on the long-run effects of shocks and crises on the health, socioeconomic outcomes and human capital of individuals has developed rapidly in historical demography and economic and social history in recent decades. A fine-grained research corpus has elaborated the negative impact of different kinds of shocks based on the type of event, the life stage of the affected individuals, and the outcomes looked at. While so-called technophysio evolution theory traditionally emphasized the role of nutrition and economic factors in damaging human capital, recent empirical evidence from historical demography suggests that health shocks exert the most significant influence on long-term outcomes. Even when the primary shock is non-epidemiological (e.g., a crisis in livelihoods, war or incarceration), health is typically the primary dimension in which such scars are formed and perpetuated throughout the life course. Such findings could carry high policy relevance.
A classic issue with correctly measuring such effects is the interplay of scarring (long-run damage) and selection (the immediate elimination of more frail individuals from the data by the crisis biasing results upwards). In real-world contexts, causal factors typically cumulate and overlap, and so do their impacts along several dimensions. The interaction of different factors, including different types of crises, gender and inequalities in socioeconomic status (SES), has been identified as a research area where more work is needed. In our ongoing Academy project A Scarred People, building on individual level data construction from historical urban settings in 20th century Tampere and Helsinki, we are focusing particularly on the impact and interaction of three shocks: the 1916 typhoid epidemic; the 1918 Civil War; and the employment crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s. We are able to look at the heterogeneity in impact of each of these by conditioning on SES (occupation, residence), sex, and age at occurrence. On the outcome side, in addition to end point variables like death, we can look at entire trajectories and life courses over time.
In this talk, we will provide empirical examples of the challenges of identifying the longevity effects of two factors, being exposed to a Typhoid epidemic in 1916 and being a member of the Red Guard in 1918 during the Civil War.
About the speakers:
Sakari Saaritsa is a Professor of Social History at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include the quantitative history of human development (particularly health, education and physiological capital), social inequality, historical indicators of well-being, and relationships between economic and human development over time. He is working with several historical datasets on Finland with local population and individual level data on demographics, anthropometrics, health and education, and involved in efforts to build national historical data infrastructure with Nordic partners. His research has been published in journals including the European Review of Economic History, Social Science History, The History of the Family and Cliometrica.
Jarmo Peltola is docent in Economic and Social History at the University of Helsinki with deep expertise in the economic, social and demographic history of crises, particularly the Great Depression, urban history, particularly of the city of Tampere, and in the development of pioneering economic, social and demographic individual level data unparalleled in Finland. Peltola has published major monographic works and international research articles on e.g., the total history of the Great Depression in Tampere, the demographic and economic history of the city and the development of health and welfare both locally and nationally.