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

Abstract

Social 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. We develop an estimation procedure for a nonlinear model with categorical outcomes in which the latent index is a mixed linear model and contains covariates that might not vary within cross-sectional units. Adjusting for only age and gender, we estimate an IHA of 0.3 indicating that about one third of a parent's health status gets transmitted to their children. Once we add additional mediators to the model, we show that education, and particularly children's education, is an important transmission channel in that it reduces the IHA by one third. Finally, we show that estimates of the IHA from nonlinear models are only moderately higher than those from linear models, whereas rank-based mobility estimates are identical.

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

“…Halliday, Mazumder, and Wong (2018) also explore heterogeneity in health mobility and find strong evidence of differences by race, region, and health insurance coverage. They also use a unique and rich set of data from the PSID’s 2013 Childhood Retrospective Circumstance Study (CRCS) on childhood variables to show that close to 40 percent of intergenerational persistence in heath can be explained by childhood circumstances.…”

“…19 However, health is notoriously difficult to measure as it is an inherently latent concept. In a recent article, Halliday, Mazumder, and Wong (2018) use the PSID’s questions on self-reported health status to estimate a series of measures of intergenerational mobility. They find that the United States has higher health mobility than income mobility.…”

“…In the absence of an intergenerational survey dataset like the PSID, it is difficult to imagine how a study like Halliday, Mazumder, and Wong (2018) would be feasible in the United States. There is no administrative data that exist in the United States that contain health records for two generations of families for a nationally representative sample.…”

The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom

“…Previous studies have emphasized the value of using long time averages to better capture latent health status (Halliday et al, 2020(Halliday et al, , 2021. This is analogous to the income mobility literature where more years of income better approximate permanent or lifetime income, otherwise estimates suffer from attenuation bias (Solon, 1992;Mazumder, 2005).…”

The Persistence of Socio-Emotional Skills: Life Cycle and Intergenerational Evidence

“…Guell et al (2015) propose an alternative approach to measure mobility by using cross-sectional data on income and the surname of the individual. There is also a growing interest in intergenerational mobility in other outcomes, such as in wealth (Charles and Hurst, 2003) and health (Halliday et al, 2019). skills.…”