Recent studies on humans and animal models indicate that stress in parents alters both parenting behaviors and parental epigenetics, which can be inherited. As a consequence, stressors in parents can transmit to the offspring, causing depression-like behavior in the descendants of stressed parents or grandparents. In turn, depression-like behavior results in decreased goal-directed activity, and depression associates with unemployment, poverty, and other adverse socioeconomic outcomes in humans. Because poverty can be stressful, and indeed depression rates are higher for the impoverished, this intergenerational transfer of the effects of stress might be an important mechanism impeding intergenerational mobility. In the language of economics, parents provide their children with a type of human capital—which I term ‘affective capital’—through their genetic and epigenetic bequests and through their parenting investments. The children carry this capital with them into adulthood, where it protects children from anxiety and depression, influencing their educational and labor market choices as well as their own parenting behavior, propagating through multiple generations.

My project aims to elucidate the roll of epigenetics, genetics, and parenting behavior in the intergenerational transmission of affective capital as well as the impact of this transmission on intergenerational mobility.