This paper empirically analyses the relationship between political leaders' socioeconomic backgrounds and public budget deficits utilising panel data on 21 OECD countries from 1980 to 2008. Building on sociological, as well as economic, research, we argue that the socioeconomic status of...

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the importance of social class, migration background and command of national languages for the PISA school performance of teenagers living in European countries (France, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and Sweden) and traditional countries of...

This paper assesses the impact of social factors on the development of allergic diseases in early childhood. Epidemiological research has shown increasing allergy rates with improvements in social economic status (SES). However, we argue that the pattern of social influences on allergies is too...

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of health in the very long run. Using a unique purpose-built administrative dataset on individuals born in Sweden between 1930-34 and their parents, we study the intergenerational transmission (IGT) of health and the impact of previous...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a suffciently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that...

According to the Blacks' Diminished Return theory, the health effects of high socioeconomic status (SES) are systemically smaller for Black compared to White families. One hypothesis is that due to the existing structural racism that encompasses residential segregation, low quality of education,...

This paper proposes a process-oriented life course perspective on intergenerational mobility by comparing the early socioeconomic trajectories of siblings to those of unrelated persons. Based on rich Finnish register data (N = 21,744), the findings show that social origin affects not only final...

The strong link between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s success in school is well established. However, mechanisms that underpin this association remain a major issue in current research on social inequality. Using data from the Families in Germany Study and structural...

We investigate the relationship between obesity and life expectancy, and whether or not this relationship varies by socioeconomic status (SES). The underlying model is based on the "Pathways to health" framework in which SES affects health by modifying the relationship between lifestyles and...

Better-educated people are healthier, although the sources of this relationship remain unclear. Starting with basic principles of consumer theory, we develop a model of how health disparities are determined that does not depend on the precise causal mechanism. Improvements in the productivity of...