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 m

SUBMITTER: Halliday TJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7899723 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature