Cornell University

Joint Labor Economics & Public Economics Workshop: Scott Imberman

Monday, March 2, 2020 11:40am to 1:10pm

B07 Tower Rd, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

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Scott Imberman - Michigan State University

Parental Human Capital Traits, Assortative Mating, and Autism Spectrum Disorder in Children

(With Todd Elder, N. Meltem Daysal, Judy Hellerstein, and Chiara Orsini)

Abstract: We examine the relationship between parental characteristics and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses in children. We posit that parents’ occupational choices reflect their underlying traits, opening new avenues to understand intergenerational transmission of developmental disorders. To this end, we combine data from multiple administrative datasets from Danish registers, using information on parental occupations, income, education, location of birth, family relationships and ASD diagnoses of children born between 1995 and 2010. We make two substantive contributions: we add to existing evidence on the relationship between characteristics of parents and ASD prevalence in children, and we provide the first large-scale empirical assessment of medical theories linking assortative mating to ASD prevalence. We follow Baron Cohen et al. (1997) and Baron-Cohen and Wheelright (2004) by using occupational choices of adults that reflect “systemizing” and “empathizing” traits. We use two different types of indexes that we argue capture important aspects of systemizing and empathizing as revealed in the occupation choices of parents. First, we create a concordance between psychometric tests of systemizing/empathizing and characteristics of the skills and abilities used in occupations in order to generate direct indexes of systemizing and empathizing across occupations. Second, we use measures of the task content of occupations in terms of four task intensity measures used in Deming (2017). Using Deming’s measures, we present robust evidence consistent with previous theories. In particular, systemizing (as measured by routine tasks in occupations) of both fathers and mothers is related to higher rates of ASD diagnoses in children, while empathizing (as measured by social skills used in an occupation) is related to lower rates of ASD diagnoses in children. These results are stronger in boys than in girls. Using the indexes of systemizing and empathizing that we construct with our concordance to psychometric texts, we again find robust evidence that empathizing of fathers is associated with lower ASD rates in children, whereas the results for mothers are less robust and less consistent with medical theories. Even though assortative mating based on systemizing and empathizing is present in Denmark, we find no evidence of a link between such assortative mating and ASD prevalence in children.