18(30)
Transmission depending on the parent’s sickness absence level
In the following analysis, we study whether the transmission from parent
to child depends on the level of sickness absence among the parents. The
focus is on investigating how the expected number of days absent due to
sickness among children varies depending on the parent’s level of sickness
absence. That is, we allow for different marginal transmission rates
depending on the parent’s position in the sickness absence distribution
among parents.
The model we estimate is the following:
,
(2)
where dummy variables (
) that take the value one if parent (
) in family
(
) belongs to the first to the fifth quintile, respectively, in the sickness
absence distribution among parents. The reference group is parents without
any sickness absence. The parameters
tell us how many more days
a child with a parent with sickness absence in quintiles 1–5 (among parents
with the same gender and with sickness absence) is absent due to sickness
in comparison with children with parents without sickness absence (the
reference category). These estimates are presented in the second column
in Table 5. For reference, we also display, in the top panel of Table 5, the
average number of days absent due to sickness among daughters and sons
with a mother or a father, respectively, without any sickness absence.
From Table 5, we confirm the result from the corresponding descriptive
analysis presented in Table 3, namely that the transmission seems to
increase with the rate of sick leave among the parents. Children of parents
without any sick leave have about half the rate of sick leave as the average
daughter and son. This result suggests that there is a threshold effect; if
the parent has sick leave, the child’s expected rate of sick leave increases.
The child’s expected number of days absent increases somewhat with the
parent’s level, but the general message is that the average transmission is
about the same up to the parent category corresponding to sickness
absence in the sixtieth percentile. For sickness absence levels above the
sixtieth percentile, the transmission is almost twice as large as the
transmission in the fortieth to the sixtieth percentile. For children of parents
in the eightieth to one-hundredth percentiles, the expected number of days
absent due to sickness is twice as large as among children with parents
without sickness absence. The overall conclusion is that the average
transmission is driven by parents with the highest levels of sickness
absence.
