A growing body of research documents the relevance of parental education as a marker of family socioeconomic status for children’s later-life health outcomes. A strand of this literature evaluates how the early-life environment shapes mortality outcomes during infancy and childhood. However, the evidence of mortality during the life course and old-age is limited. This paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the association between paternal education and children’s old-age mortality. In so doing, we construct a longitudinal panel using data from Social Security Administration death records over the years 1988-2005 linked to the 1940 US census and search for fathers’ family tree in historical censuses (1900-1930). Applying a family (cousin) fixed effect model to account for shared environment, childhood exposures, and common endowments that may confound the longterm links, we find that having a father with a college education or a high school education, compared to elementary/no education, is associated with 4.6 and 2.6 months higher age at death for the child, conditional on child survival up to age 47. These effects are virtually unchanged when we exclude family fixed effects suggesting that shared experiences do not confound the OLS estimates. The effects are robust across a wide range of specification checks, functional forms, and selection criteria. Heterogeneity analyses imply that the effects are more pronounced among males, blacks, children with higher maternal education, and families with a low socioeconomic index. We discuss and evaluate conditions under which non-shared exposures may lead the marginal effects to
overestimate the true effects.