Heterogeneity in the Intergenerational Transmission of Alcohol Consumption – A Quantile Regression Approach

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 eff ect 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 eff ect 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.