The impact of parental income and education on child health: further evidence for England

Abstract

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