Like Parent, Like Child: Intergenerational Patterns of Cardiovascular Risk Factors at Midlife

Purpose: We aimed to assess the prevalence of four cardiovascular risk factors (obesity, diabetes, excessive alcohol intake, and cigarette smoking) for parents and their adult children at the same approximate midlife age. We also evaluated associations of parents' cardiovascular risk factors, childhood health exposures, and social contexts (i.e., family, school, and neighborhood) during adolescence with adult children's cardiovascular health at midlife. Methods: We used data from respondents at Wave V of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health who had corresponding parent (mostly mothers) data from Wave I. The final sample included 10,466 adult children with a mean age of 37.8 years. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression models were estimated, accounting for the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health sampling design. Results: At similar ages (i.e., 35–45 years) to their parents, adult children had higher rates of excessive drinking and obesity than their parents, lower rates of diabetes, and similar rates of smoking. Adult children's health largely converged and correlated with their parents' health at similar ages. Cardiovascular risks for adult children were also significantly associated with their childhood health exposures and social contexts during adolescence. Some associations varied with respect to the health status of parents at Wave I. Conclusions: The cardiovascular risk of parents at midlife is strongly associated with the cardiovascular risk of their adult children at midlife. The status of parents' health during adolescence can also modify the significance and magnitude of associations between childhood health exposures or adolescent social contexts and adult children's cardiovascular risk factors

The Role of Family Health History in Predicting Midlife Chronic Disease Outcomes

Introduction: The generational relevance for determining disease risk for the leading causes of morbidity and mortality for U.S. adults is a source of debate. Methods: Data on 12,300 adults (Add Health Study Members) participating in Wave V (2016–2018) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (also known as Add Health) were merged with data from respondents’ parents (n=2,013) participating in the Add Health Parent Study (2015–2017). Analyses beginning in January 2020 examined the concordance in lifetime occurrence of chronic conditions across 4 generations, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obesity, cancer, and depression and examined the associations between individual disease history and ones’ family health history for the same condition. Results: Mean ages were 37.4 years for Add Health Study Members and 62.9 years for Add Health Parent Study mothers. The histories of mothers from the Add Health Parent Study on hyperlipidemia (AOR=1.61, 95% CI=1.04, 2.48), obesity (AOR=1.77, 95% CI=1.27, 2.48), and depression (AOR=1.87, 95% CI=1.19, 2.95) were significantly associated with increased odds of Add Health Study Member report of these conditions. Maternal great grandparent hyperlipidemia history was significantly associated with the Add Health Study Member hyperlipidemia (AOR=2.81, 95% CI=1.51, 5.21). Histories of diabetes in maternal grandfather (AOR=2.41, 95% CI=1.24, 4.69) and maternal great grandparent (AOR=3.05, 95% CI=1.45, 6.43) were significantly associated with Add Health Study Member diabetes. Each additional point in the Add Health Parent Study mothers’ cardiometabolic risk factor index was associated with an 11% increase (incidence rate ratio=1.11, 95% CI=1.04, 1.19) in the expected count of cardiometabolic risk conditions for the Add Health Study Members. Conclusions: Multigenerational health histories have value for quantifying the probability of diabetes, obesity, depression, and hyperlipidemia in early mid-adulthood. Family health history knowledge is relevant for health promotion and disease prevention strategies

An Empirical Analysis of Life Cycle Fertility and Female Labor Supply

This paper examines household fertility and female labor supply over the life cycle. We investigate how maternal time inputs, market expenditures on offspring, as well as the benefits they yield their parents, vary with ages of offspring, and influence female labor supply and contraceptive behavior. Our econometric framework combines a female labor supply model and a contraceptive choice index function. It also accounts for the fact that conceptions are not perfectly controllable events. Using longitudinal data on married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate these equations and test alternative specifications of the technologies governing chld care. Our findings suggest that while parents cannot perfectly control conceptions, variations in child care costs do affect the life cycle spacing of births. Furthermore, our results demonstrate the gains of modelling the linkages between female labor supply and fertility behavior at the household level

Intertemporal Preferences and Labor Supply

Recently, several authors have argued for the use for the use of dynamic preference structures for leisure which incorporate forms of intertemporally nonseparable utility in the analysis of intertemporal labor supply decisions. In this paper, we examine whether such nonseparable utility functions are important in characterizing microdata on life-cycle labor supply. Using longitudinal data on males from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate a model of life-cycle labor supply and consumption under uncertainty in which the structure of intertemporal leisure preferences is allowed to be nonseparable in leisure. Our model nests as special cases a number of alternative specifications considered in the literature. We investigate the robustness of our findings to certain forms of population heterogeneity and to some types of model misspecification. Across a number of alternative specifications, we find evidence that the standard assumption of intertemporally separable preferences for leisure is not consistent with data for prime-age males

New Evidence on the Timing and Spacing of Births

This is a progress report on an ongoing empirical study of the determinants of life cycle fertility. "The main objective of the early stage of [the] work is to codify the 'facts' in a coherent statistical framework that provides the duration data analogue of the conventional simultaneous equations model." After reviewing the relevant literature, the authors present an empirical analysis of data on fertility, marital status, and work histories for 570 Swedish women born between 1941 and 1945. The data are from a survey conducted by the Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics in 198

Are There Returns to the Wages of Young Men from Working While in School?

This paper examines the impacts of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men’s wage rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Previous studies have found evidence of sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high school, on subsequent wage growth; and that the return to such inschool work experience does not decline in age. Such findings may represent causal effects of having acquired work experience while still enrolled in school, but they may also be the result of failure to fully account for individual differences in young adults’ capacities to acquire such skills and be productive in the work force later in life. We re-examine the robustness of previous attempts to control for unobserved heterogeneity and selectivity. We explore more general methods for dealing with dynamic forms of selection by explicitly modeling the educational and work choices of young men from age 13 through their late twenties. Using data on young men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, (NLSY79), we find that the estimated returns to working while in high school or college are dramatically diminished in magnitude and statistical significance when one uses these dynamic selection methods, and the return to in-school work experience dropped over time. As such, our results indicate a decided lack of robustness to the inference about the effects of working while in school that has been drawn from previous work

The Impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Poverty: Analyzing the Dimensions by Race and Immigration

Earned income tax credit, Immigration, Poverty, Race,

A Parallel Implementation of the Simplex Function Minimization Routine

Parallel computing, Optimization algorithms,