Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2011
DOI
10.2202/1935-1682.2880
Publication Title
The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy
Volume
11
Issue
3
Pages
0-16
Abstract
Intergenerational disparity in income and health violates the norm of equal opportunity and deserves the attention of researchers and policy makers. To understand changes in intergenerational disparity, we created the intergenerational mobility index (IMI), which can simultaneously measure changes in income rankings and in health outcomes across two generations. We selected obesity as one health outcome to illustrate the application of IMI due to its severe health and financial consequences for society and the significant changes in the distribution of obesity across income groups. Although obesity has increased in all income groups in the last four decades, higher income groups have tended to have a faster increase in obesity, which has reduced the disparity in obesity across income groups. The strength of our intergenerational approach within families is to control the genetic influence, which is one of the strongest determinants of obesity. The decomposition of the IMI illustrates that it captures changes in obesity distribution (holding constant income rankings between generations) and changes in income rankings (holding constant the obesity distribution across generations), simultaneously. We used the data of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which have been collected since 1967, is the longest longitudinal survey in the U.S. The PSID surveyed respondents’ height and weight were recorded in 1986 and from 1999 to 2007. We selected respondents from 1986 as the parental generation and respondents from 2007 as the adult children’s generation. To make the adult children’s body weight status and income comparable to their parents’, we stratified the analysis by gender. For the pairs of fathers and adult sons, we found the intergenerational disparity in overweight, a less severe indicator of excessive fatness, across income was decreasing. This was partially due to the up-swing in the adult children’s income status. For the pairs of mothers and adult daughters, we found a similar decrease in socioeconomic disparity in obesity. However, decomposition of the IMI indicated that changes in income distributions between mothers and adult daughters contributed smaller effects than that between fathers and adult sons. Our study has demonstrated that the IMI and its decomposition are useful tools for analyzing intergenerational disparity in income and health.
Original Publication Citation
Zhang, Q., Zheng, B., Zhang, N., & Wang, Y. (2011). Decomposing the intergenerational disparity in income and obesity. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 11(3), 0-16. doi:10.2202/1935-1682.2880
Repository Citation
Zhang, Qi; Zheng, Buhong; Zhang, Ning; and Wang, Youfa, "Decomposing the Intergenerational Disparity in Income and Obesity" (2011). Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications. 35.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/commhealth_fac_pubs/35
Included in
Community Health and Preventive Medicine Commons, Medical Humanities Commons, Occupational Health and Industrial Hygiene Commons
Comments
De Gruyter allows authors the use of the final published version of an article (publisher pdf) for self-archiving (author's personal website) and/or archiving in an institutional repository (on a non-profit server) after an embargo period of 12 months after publication.
Publisher's version available at: https://doi.org/10.2202/1935-1682.2880