Medical Treatments and Social Mobility

Resumé

Economists have long been interested in understanding the relationship between health and socioeconomic outcomes. Existing research consistently links poor health during early childhood to worse well-being in the long-run, including health, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes (Almond and Currie, 2011; Almond, Currie, and Duque, 2018; Currie et al., 2010). Growing evidence also indicates that child health shocks affect the socio-economic outcomes of other family members, such as parental labor supply (Gunnsteinsson and Steingrimsdottir, 2019; Breivik and Costa-Ramón, 2022; Eriksen et al., 2021; Adhvaryu et al., 2022), parental health (Burton, Lethbridge, and Phipps, 2008; Adhvaryu et al., 2022), and sibling academic achievement (Black et al., 2021). A natural question then is whether medical care aimed at improving childhood health may alleviate or eliminate these negative long-run consequences.