Citation

Schmidt CM, Tauchmann H. J. Health Econ. 2011; 30(1): 33-42.

Affiliation

Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung e.V. (RWI), Hohenzollernstraße 1-3, D-45128 Essen, Germany; Ruhr-University Bochum, Faculty of Economics, Bochum, Germany; IZA, Bonn, Germany; CEPR, London, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jhealeco.2010.09.005

PMID

21035217

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of whether the effect of parental drinking on children's later consumption of alcohol - which is frequently found to be of positive sign - exhibits a certain pattern of heterogeneity. In particular, if this effect is more prominent in the upper tail than elsewhere in the distribution of children's alcohol consumption, conventional regression analyses that focus on the mean effect may substantially underrate parental drinking as a risk factor for children's later alcohol abuse. In our empirical application, we address this issue by applying censored quantile regression methods to German survey data. The supposed pattern of heterogeneity is indeed found in the data, at least for daily parental drinking. In addition, the intergenerational transmission of alcohol consumption exhibits gender-specific heterogeneity.

Language: en