# Multigenerational inequalities of opportunity in health outcomes

## TL;DR

The paper finds that grandparents' socioeconomic status affects personal health outcomes, even after considering parents' health and status.

## Contribution

It shows that multigenerational socioeconomic factors influence health, suggesting social class traits may drive health disparities.

## Key findings

- Grandparental socioeconomic status significantly impacts personal health outcomes beyond parental factors.
- The effect is particularly notable in relation to educational outcomes on the father’s side.
- The results suggest ingrained socioeconomic advantages or disadvantages may indicate social class influences on health.

## Abstract

This paper studies multigenerational health transmission mechanisms in Australian panel data. Using inequality-of-opportunity (IOP) models, we demonstrate that grandparental socioeconomic status (SES) is an important determinant of personal health, even after controlling for health and SES at the parental level. Our findings hold over a range of health/biomarkers of individuals’ physical and mental well-being and appear to be especially sensitive to educational outcomes on the father’s side. Since ingrained socioeconomic (dis)advantages that persist over multiple generations may be indicative of social class, our results suggest that subtle attitudinal and behavioural characteristics associated with this variable may be a key factor driving health disparities.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12939-024-02144-0.