Search Results
Source: Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Thompson, Owen |
|
The Intergenerational Transmission of Health Status: Estimates and Mechanisms Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, August 2012 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Asthma; Body Mass Index (BMI); Child Health; Health Care; Household Income; Insurance, Health; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; National Health Interview Survey (NHIS); National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth); Obesity; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Pre-natal Care/Exposure Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper investigates the extent to which health status is correlated across generations, and the mechanisms through which health transmission occurs. Using three large US data sets, the paper first documents strong intergenerational associations in self-rated health, health limitations, obesity, asthma, hay fever, headaches and diabetes. Children with a parent who reports having one of these conditions are at least 50%-100% more likely to report the condition themselves, and these effects differ by parental gender and child age. I then systematically investigate the mechanisms underlying these associations. To assess the importance of genetic mechanisms, I estimate health correlations between different types of twins and siblings, and estimate the strength of health transmission for samples of adopted versus biological children. To assess the importance of environmental transmission mechanisms, I utilize detailed controls for socioeconomic status, health care access and utilization, health behaviors, cognitive test scores, and prenatal and early childhood conditions, and also estimate fixed-effects models at the census block-group and school levels. The core finding of these exercises is that intergenerational health associations are remarkably robust. Even when models with extensive controls are estimated using a sample of adopted children, qualitatively large intergenerational health associations are present. |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Thompson, Owen. "The Intergenerational Transmission of Health Status: Estimates and Mechanisms." Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, August 2012. |