Adult Children’s Education and Physical and Cognitive Health Trajectories of Older Parents in Denmark

Cosmo Strozza , Sapienza University of Rome
Virginia Zarulli, University of Padova, Department of Statistics

Researchers interested in health inequality focused on how partners influence each other and how the resources of the older generations influence younger generations in terms of health. However, only a few studies examined the opposite relationship: intergenerational transmission of human capital from younger to older generations. The aim of this study is to understand whether the educational attainment of adult children (a) is associated to physical and cognitive decline of their old parents; (b) this relationship persists also when controlling for parent’s socio-economic characteristics; (c) there is a gender difference on human capital transmission. Using SHARE data for Denmark and the linkage to the Danish National Registry will allow us to have exact information on parent’s survival. Latent classes of physical and cognitive functioning trajectories over the follow-up period will be constructed by using Growth-Mixture-Model (GMM) in order to identify different subpopulation of longitudinal changes among the old parents.

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 Presented in Session 54. Intergenerational Spillover Effects