IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp11304.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Intergenerational Health Mobility in the US

Author

Listed:
  • Halliday, Timothy J.

    (University of Hawaii at Manoa)

  • Mazumder, Bhashkar

    (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)

  • Wong, Ashley

    (Tilburg University)

Abstract

Studies of intergenerational mobility have largely ignored health despite the central importance of health to welfare. We present the first estimates of intergenerational health mobility in the US by using repeated measures of self-reported health status (SRH) during adulthood from the PSID. Our main finding is that there is substantially greater health mobility than income mobility in the US. A possible explanation is that social institutions and policies are more effective at disrupting intergenerational health transmission than income transmission. We further show that health and income each capture a distinct dimension of social mobility. We also characterize heterogeneity in health mobility by child gender, parent gender, race, education, geography and health insurance coverage in childhood. We find some important differences in the patterns of health mobility compared with income mobility and also find some evidence that there has been a notable decline in health mobility for more recent cohorts. We use a rich set of background characteristics to highlight potential mechanisms leading to intergenerational health persistence.

Suggested Citation

  • Halliday, Timothy J. & Mazumder, Bhashkar & Wong, Ashley, 2018. "Intergenerational Health Mobility in the US," IZA Discussion Papers 11304, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11304
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp11304.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jason Fletcher & Katie M. Jajtner, 2021. "Intergenerational health mobility: Magnitudes and Importance of Schools and Place," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(7), pages 1648-1667, July.
    2. Lazuka, Volha & Sandholt Jensen, Peter, 2021. "Multigenerational Effects of Smallpox Vaccination," Lund Papers in Economic History 232, Lund University, Department of Economic History.
    3. Cobb-Clark, Deborah A. & Dahmann, Sarah C. & Salamanca, Nicolás & Zhu, Anna, 2022. "Intergenerational disadvantage: Learning about equal opportunity from social assistance receipt," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    4. Evelina Björkegren & Mikael Lindahl & Mårten Palme & Emilia Simeonova, 2022. "Pre- and Post-Birth Components of Intergenerational Persistence in Health and Longevity: Lessons from a Large Sample of Adoptees," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 57(1), pages 112-142.
    5. Fletcher, Jason & Jajtner, Katie M., 2023. "Multidimensional intergenerational mobility," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 328(C).
    6. Carsten Andersen, 2019. "Intergenerational Health Mobility: Evidence from Danish Registers," Economics Working Papers 2019-04, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    7. Heather Brown, 2020. "Understanding the role of policy on inequalities in the intergenerational correlation in health and wages: Evidence from the UK from 1991–2017," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(6), pages 1-16, June.
    8. Bhashkar Mazumder, 2018. "Intergenerational Mobility in the United States: What We Have Learned from the PSID," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 680(1), pages 213-234, November.
    9. Timothy J. Halliday & Bhashkar Mazumder & Ashley Wong, 2020. "The intergenerational transmission of health in the United States: A latent variables analysis," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(3), pages 367-381, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    inequality; mobility; health; intergenerational;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11304. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.