Like Mother, Like Father? Gender Assortative Transmission of Child Overweight
Joan Costa-i-Font and
Mireia Jofre-Bonet
No 5985, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo
Abstract:
We study the intergenerational transmission of overweight, that is the association between parental overweight and that of their offspring and examine whether it is gender-assortative or whether the maternal or paternal overweight is related differently to daughters than to sons. We draw from 15 years of data from the Health Survey for England, which contains records of clinically measured weight and height of a representative sample of English children. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a strong intergenerational transmission of overweight from parents to their offspring. These effects are stronger among white children and older parents. We also find support for the existence of an unanticipated gender-assortative transmission of obesity and overweight, namely, a stronger association of father’s overweight and that of his daughters that is statistically significantly different than that of the mother (with her daughters). Our evidence suggests a higher likelihood of being overweight among girls when their mother is obese.
Keywords: gender assortative parental transmission; child obesity; child overweight; role models; inter-generational transmission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp5985.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Like Mother, Like Father? Gender Assortative Transmission Of Child Overweight (2016) 
Working Paper: Like Mother, Like Father? Gender Assortative Transmission Of Child Overweight (2016) 
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:ces:ceswps:_5985
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().