Intergenerational Mobility by Sexuality

Intergenerational mobility has been shown to vary across groups defined by family-level characteristics such as race, neighbourhood, and parental immigration status. We provide the first population-wide evidence that the relationship between parental background and adult children's earnings, health, fertility, and family formation is also stratified by sexuality – an individual-level characteristic that varies within families. To do so, we develop a new strategy to identify same-sex and different-sex couples in Danish administrative data using joint financial commitments. Our approach mitigates limitations associated with non-representative surveys and cross-sectional data on sexuality. Drawing on identity economics and minority stress theory, we propose a conceptual framework in which deviation from the social prescription of different-sex attraction generates identity costs that may decline with parental resources through reduced exposure to discrimination and enhanced coping capacity. Empirically, we find that disparities generally persist across the parental income distribution, though severe mental health conditions are particularly elevated among same-sex attracted individuals from low-income families. We explore parent-child relationships as potential mechanisms, finding that same-sex attracted individuals live farther from parents across the income distribution. Results are robust to controlling for unobserved parental heterogeneity through sibling fixed effects, though they vary across childhood regions and cohorts. Our findings suggest that intergenerational mobility varies not only with factors shared by siblings but also with individual-level characteristics, such as sexuality.