Subjective socioeconomic status, health, and early-life conditions

Abstract

We study the role of subjective social status on health and its correlates, with an 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 their effects on subjective socioeconomic status. We find that socioeconomic factors during childhood are important predictors of subjective social status, even after controlling for contemporaneous socioeconomic conditions. This shows an additional psychological and behavioral channel through which early-life conditions influence later outcomes and which has not been yet studied in sufficient detail.