Intergenerational Mobility by Sexuality

Abstract

Existing research documents substantial disparities in life outcomes between same-sex and different-sex attracted individuals, typically disadvantaging same-sex attracted individuals. We analyse how parental background relates to adult children’s earnings, health, fertility, and family formation by sexuality. To do so, we develop a new strategy to identify same-sex and different-sex couples in population-wide administrative data using joint financial commitments from Denmark. Our approach mitigates limitations associated with non-representative surveys and cross-sectional data on sexuality. Drawing on identity economics and minority stress theory, we propose a conceptual framework in which deviation from the social prescription of different-sex attraction generates identity costs that may decline with parental resources through reduced exposure to discrimination and enhanced coping capacity. Empirically, we find that disparities generally persist across the parental income distribution, though severe mental health conditions are particularly elevated among same-sex attracted individuals from low-income families. We explore parent-child relationships as potential mechanisms, finding that same-sex attracted individuals live farther from parents across the income distribution. Results are robust to controlling for unobserved parental heterogeneity through sibling fixed effects, but vary across childhood regions and cohorts. Our findings suggest that intergenerational mobility depends not only on factors shared by siblings but also on innate individual characteristics, such as sexuality.