Social Background and Parent's Health: Their Impact on Health Status in Adulthood

This paper's main objective is to explore the hypothesis of an intergenerational transmission of health inequalities. We try to understand and measure the impact of both social background and parents' health on health status in adulthood by disentangling its direct effect and its indirect one. The Survey on Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) offers a unique occasion to test this hypothesis for France as for the first time various general health indicators in adulthood and parents' social status are gathered together. We explain health status in adulthood as measured by self-assessed health, according to both the health and the social family background, using ordered Logit models as well as tests of stochastic dominance. The social family background relies on parents' respective socioeconomic status whereas parents' health is measured with their real or estimated age at death as regard to their life expectancy at birth. We show that beyond its relation with current social conditions, health status in adulthood is influenced by both social background and parents' health. Health status in adulthood is directly explained by the mother' social status and both parent's health status whereas the influence of father's social status goes through its strong correlation with children's social status. These results emphasize strong links between social conditions in childhood and health status in adulthood in France, coming from both pathways and latency models. Moreover, a third association between parents' health and child's health in adulthood is observed. The gradient in health status according to which wealthier people have better health and live longer is observed in adulthood but has antecedents in childhood. Although previous works exhibit inequalities of opportunity in income in France (Lefranc et al., 2004), this study highlights results concerning the existence of inequalities of opportunity in health which have never been analysed. This result is appealing from a normative point of view since parents' social status as well as parent's health are independent of individual's responsibility.