Family and Community Influences on Health and Socioeconomic Status: Sibling Correlations Over the Life Course
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Bhashkar Mazumder
Abstract
This paper presents new estimates of sibling correlations in health and socioeconomic outcomes over the life course in the U.S. Sibling correlations provide an omnibus measure of the importance of all family and community influences. I find that sibling correlations in a range of health and socioeconomic outcomes start quite high at birth and remain high over the life course. The sibling correlation in birth weight is estimated to be 0.5. Sibling correlations in test scores during childhood are as high as 0.6. Sibling correlations in adult men’s wages are also around 0.5. Decompositions provide suggestive evidence on which pathways may account for the gradients in health and SES by family background. For example, sibling correlations in cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills during childhood are lower controlling for family income. Similarly, parent education levels can account for a sizable portion of the correlation in adult health status among brothers.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- Health Inequality over the Life-Cycle
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Articles in the same Issue
- Socioeconomic Status and Health Over the Life Course and Across Generations: Introduction to a Special Issue and Overview of a Unique Data Resource
- Advances Article
- Attrition in Models of Intergenerational Links Using the PSID with Extensions to Health and to Sibling Models
- The Influence of Early-Life Events on Human Capital, Health Status, and Labor Market Outcomes Over the Life Course
- Health Dynamics and the Evolution of Health Inequality over the Life Course: The Importance of Neighborhood and Family Background
- Contributions Article
- Family and Community Influences on Health and Socioeconomic Status: Sibling Correlations Over the Life Course
- Decomposing the Intergenerational Disparity in Income and Obesity
- Health Inequality over the Life-Cycle
- Topics Article
- Estimating the Education-Health Relationship: A Cost-Utility Approach
- Occupational Status and Health Transitions
