Intergenerational health mobility: Evidence from Danish registers.

Area of Science:

• Health Economics
• Sociology
• Behavioral Genetics

Background:

• Investigating health mobility is crucial for understanding socioeconomic disparities.
• High-quality administrative data and twin analyses offer objective health measures and large sample sizes.
• Traditional metrics like intergenerational correlations (IGCs) may not fully capture health mobility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate health mobility using objective measures and advanced statistical methods.
• To compare health mobility with other socioeconomic outcomes like education and income.
• To assess the influence of family background and genetics on individual health outcomes.

Main Methods:

• Operationalizing health mobility through rank-rank slopes, intergenerational correlations (IGCs), and sibling/identical twin correlations.
• Utilizing large-scale administrative data for robust statistical analysis.
• Comparing correlations across different familial relationships (parent-child, siblings, identical twins).

Main Results:

• Rank-rank slopes and IGCs for health mobility were found to be between 0.11-0.15.
• Sibling correlations ranged from 0.14-0.20, indicating relatively high health mobility.
• Sibling correlations captured significantly more variation in health outcomes than traditional IGCs.

Conclusions:

• Health mobility is substantial, with a notable portion of health variation attributable to family background and genetics (14%-38%).
• Sibling correlations provide a more comprehensive measure of health mobility compared to parent-child associations.
• Findings suggest that traditional parent-child associations are insufficient for accurately measuring health mobility.