As health is increasingly recognized as a key component of human welfare, a new line of research on intergenerational mobility has emerged that focuses on broad measures of health. We extend this research to consider two key components of health: physical health and mental health. We use rich survey data from the United Kingdom linking the health of adult children at around age 30 to their parents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article estimates changes in all-cause mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic by socioeconomic characteristics and occupation for nonelderly adults in the US, using large-scale, national survey data linked to administrative mortality records. Mortality increases were largest for adults living in correctional facilities or in health care-related group quarters, those without health insurance coverage, those with family incomes below the federal poverty level, and those in occupations with limited work-from-home options. For almost all subgroups, mortality increases were higher among non-Hispanic Black respondents than among non-Hispanic White respondents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present estimates of intergenerational mobility in self-reported health status (SRHS) in the US using data from the PSID. We estimate that the rank-rank slope in SRHS is 0.26.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial scientists have long documented that many components of socioeconomic status such as income and education have strong ties across generations. However, health status, arguably a more critical component of welfare, has largely been ignored. We fill this void by providing the first estimates of the Intergenerational Health Association (IHA) that are explicitly based on a nonlinear latent variable model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnn Am Acad Pol Soc Sci
November 2018
This article reviews the contributions of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to the study of intergenerational mobility. The PSID enables researchers to track individuals as they form new households and covers many dimensions of socioeconomic status over large portions of the life cycle, making the data ideal for studying intergenerational mobility. Studies have used PSID data to show that the United States is among the least economically mobile countries among advanced economies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examine the effect of the Medicaid expansions under the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on consumer financial outcomes using data from a major credit reporting agency for a large, national sample of adults. We employ the synthetic control method to compare individuals living in states that expanded Medicaid to those that did not. We find that the Medicaid expansions significantly reduced the number of unpaid bills and the amount of debt sent to third-party collection agencies among those residing in zip codes with the highest share of low-income, uninsured individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate sibling correlations in youth health status using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We do so by estimating the covariance structure of a system of equations in latent variables using methods that have hitherto not been used in the literature on intergenerational transmissions of health. Across a battery of outcomes, we find that between 50 and 60% of health status can be attributed to shared familial or neighborhood characteristics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiodemography Soc Biol
December 2016
A growing body of literature has shown that environmental exposures in the period around conception can affect the sex ratio at birth through selective attrition that favors the survival of female conceptuses. Glucose availability is considered a key indicator of the fetal environment, and its absence as a result of meal skipping may inhibit male survival. We hypothesize that breakfast skipping during pregnancy may lead to a reduction in the fraction of male births.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFB E J Econom Anal Policy
September 2011
This paper presents new estimates of sibling correlations in health and socioeconomic outcomes over the life course in the U.S. Sibling correlations provide an omnibus measure of the importance of all family and community influences.
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