An Analysis of Sibling Correlations in Health using Latent Variable Models

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu Taking the principal component across all outcomes, we obtain a sibling correlation of about 53%. These estimates, which are larger than previous estimates of sibling correlations in health that rely on linear models, are more in-line with sibling correlations in income and suggest that health status, like other measures of socioeconomic success, is strongly influenced by family background. Therefore, efforts to improve the circumstances of families and communities may potentially lead to improved childhood health today and also reduce future health disparities. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SJEL Classification: I0, I12, J0, D3, J62

Intergenerational Mobility in the United States: What We Have Learned from the PSID

“…Later studies using the PSID by Björklund et al (2002), Mazumder (2011), and Schnitzlein (2014) also found very similar estimates, as did Mazumder (2008) using the NLSY79. Mazumder (2011) and Halliday and Mazumder (2017) have also extended the sibling correlation approach to examine health outcomes using the PSID data. These studies generally show that the shared components of family background among siblings include much more than just the parental influences captured by inter-generational associations alone.…”

The intergenerational transmission of health in the United States: A latent variables analysis

“…In this sense, our approach is similar to the approach adopted by Halliday and Mazumder (2017) who also employed latent variable models to estimate sibling correlations in health status that can be viewed as another measure of mobility. The different integer values of SRHS correspond to different health categories, for example, excellent and very good.…”

“…Finally, Björkegren, Lindahl, Palme, and Simeonova (2019) use Swedish administrative data on adoptees to investigate the relative importance of biological and adoptive parents in determining the health of the child; they show that the biological parents matter considerably more. To address these issues, we develop a Bayesian estimation procedure that fuses the approach to the estimation of selection models in van Hasselt (2011) with another approach to estimating nonlinear binary outcome models in which the index is also a mixed linear model developed in Halliday and Mazumder (2017). This table report reports the means and standard deviation (in parentheses) of each variable.…”

“…The approach that we adopt in this paper is that SRHS is a proxy for a more fundamental latent variable that corresponds to the respondent's actual health status. In this sense, our approach is similar to the approach adopted by Halliday and Mazumder (2017) who also employed latent variable models to estimate sibling correlations in health status that can be viewed as another measure of mobility.…”

Testing for family influences on obesity: The role of genetic nurture

“…A substantial literature documents that there is a strong positive correlation between siblings in their health and health behaviors. Halliday and Mazumder (2017) estimate that the correlations among young siblings in health conditions range from 0.5 to 0.6. In U.S. data, the correlation between siblings in smoking is 0.355, drinking alcohol is 0.350, frequency of TV watching is 0.366, and frequency of exercise is 0.209 (Daw, Margolis, & Verdery, 2015), and the correlation in body mass index (BMI) 1 is 0.53 (Brown & Roberts, 2012).…”