The intergenerational transmission of mental and physical health in the United Kingdom

Panka Bencsik, Timothy Halliday and Bhashkar Mazumder

Journal of Health Economics, 2023, vol. 92, issue C

Abstract: As health is increasingly recognized as a key component of human welfare, a new line of research on intergenerational mobility has emerged that focuses on broad measures of health. We extend this research to consider two key components of health: physical health and mental health. We use rich survey data from the United Kingdom linking the health of adult children at around age 30 to their parents. We estimate that the rank–rank slope in health is 0.17 and the intergenerational health association is 0.19 suggesting relatively rapid mobility compared to other outcomes such as income. We find that while both mental and physical health have a similar degree of intergenerational persistence, parents’ mental health is much more strongly associated with broad measures of adult children’s health than parents’ physical health. We also show that the primacy of parent mental health over physical health on children’s health appears to emerge during early adolescence. Finally, we construct a comprehensive measure of welfare by combining income and health and estimate a rank–rank association of 0.27. This is considerably lower than the comparable estimate of 0.43 from the US suggesting that there is greater mobility in welfare in the UK than in the US.

Keywords: Intergenerational health mobility; Mental health; Physical health; United Kingdom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629623000826
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom (2021)
Working Paper: The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom (2021)
Working Paper: The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:92:y:2023:i:c:s0167629623000826

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2023.102805

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().