The Impact of Parental Income and Education on Child Health: Further Evidence for England

This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental education and income on child health. We are particularly concerned about spurious correlation arising from the potential endogeneity of parental income and education. We adopt an instrumental variables approach and our results suggest that the parental income and education effects are generally larger than are suggested by the correlations observed in the data. Moreover, we find strong support for the causal effect of income effect being large for the poor but small at the average level of income. * We are indebted to the Nuffield Foundation for providing a New Career Development Fellowship for Harmon and to Princeton University for providing a Visiting Fellowship for Walker. We are grateful to Christina Paxson, and other participants at the Global Network on Inequality: New Direction in Inequality and Stratification Conference at Princeton University, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This paper forms part of the Geary Institute programme of research at University College Dublin. The data used in this paper was made available by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex and is used with permission. The data files used in this paper can be made available to other researchers subject to permission from the Data Archive. Corresponding author: Professor Colm Harmon, Geary Institute, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland Tel +3531 7164615, Fax +353 1 7161108 Email [email protected]