Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Early Life Conditions

We study the role of subjective social status on health and its determinants, with a particular emphasis on the predictive power of early-life conditions on subjective social status. A well-established literature links early-life conditions to later-life objective measures of socioeconomic status, but little attention has been paid to the effects on subjective socioeconomic status. We find that socioeconomic factors during childhood are extremely important predictors of subjective social status, even after controlling for contemporaneous socioeconomic conditions. In particular, experiencing good health, having access to electricity, and having married parents during childhood increases one's chance of being in high subjective social status during adulthood, which leads to better health, even after conditioning for objective social status. The results therefore show an additional psychological and behavioral channel through which early-life conditions influence later outcomes, and which has not been yet studied in sufficient detail