The Impact of Physical and Sexual Abuse in Childhood on Adult Economic Outcomes: Evidence from the Ontario Child Health Study

In this paper we use data from the Ontario Child Health Study, a community panel study which collected socio-demographic and health information from individuals aged 4-16 in 1983 and which was conducted in three waves (1983, 1987, 2001). A rare property of this survey is that questions were included in 2001 to obtain retrospective reports of physical and sexual abuse in childhood on an ordinal scale. We use this information to examine the neglected topic of the adulthood economic consequences of physical and sexual abuse in childhood. We present descriptive analyses which examine simple and partial correlations between our measures of adult economic outcomes and ordinal measures of abuse. We then estimate single equation regression models for each of our economic outcome variables as a function of the abuse variables and other socioeconomic characteristics. In a third stage we include education variables to examine whether these variables mediate the effects of abuse in childhood to adulthood economic outcomes.