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The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom

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Abstract

We estimate intergenerational health persistence in the United Kingdom using Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY), a broad measure of health derived from the SF-12 Survey. We estimate that both the rank-rank slope and the intergenerational health association (IHA) are 0.21. We use components of the SF-12 to create mental and physical health indices and find that mental health is at least as persistent across generations as physical health. Importantly, parents' mental health is much more strongly associated with children's health than parents' physical health indicating that mental health might be a more important transmission channel. Finally, we construct an overall measure of welfare that combines income and health, and estimate a rank-rank association of 0.31. This is considerably lower than a comparable estimate of 0.43 for the US, suggesting greater mobility of overall welfare in the UK than the US.

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  • Panka Bencsik & Timothy J. Halliday & Bhashkar Mazumder, 2021. "The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom," Working Paper Series WP-2021-03, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, revised 26 Feb 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedhwp:92153
    DOI: 10.21033/wp-2021-03
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    Cited by:

    1. Michaela Benzeval & Thomas F. Crossley & Edith Aguirre, 2023. "A symposium on Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study: introduction," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 44(4), pages 317-340, December.
    2. Costi, C.; & Migali, G.; & Zucchelli, E.;, 2024. "Intergenerational persistence of education, smoking and birth weight: evidence from three generations," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 24/02, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    intergenerational health mobility; mental health; physical health; United Kingdom;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion

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