Intergenerational health mobility: Magnitudes and Importance of Schools and Place.

This paper broadens the literature on intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status to consider individual, family, and spatial variation in intergenerational health mobility in the United States. Using a school-based representative panel (Add Health), we report overall health persistence of 0.17 with higher mobility in Hispanic families. We find large variation by place; intergenerational health persistence estimates range between 0 and 0.5, with similarly large ranges for absolute upward and downward health mobility. School- and contextual-level correlates indicate local race/ethnicity composition, proportion of single parents, and average mother's education may be related to observed variation in intergenerational health mobility.