Genetic nurture in educational attainment |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Cornell University and NBER, United States;2. Yonsei University, South Korea;3. Bryn Mawr College, United States;4. University of Michigan and NBER, United States;1. Faculty of Economics, University of Iceland, Oddi v/Sturlugotu, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland;2. Faculty of Business Administration, University of Iceland, Oddi v/Sturlugotu, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland;1. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy;2. Department of Economics, University of Bergamo, Italy;1. Epidemiology and Public Health Research Group, Centre for Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast, BT12 6BJ Northern Ireland, United Kingdom;2. School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China;1. Institute for Health Care & Public Management, University of Hohenheim, 70599 Stuttgart, Germany;2. School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, 710061 Xi’an, China;3. IZA, Bonn, Germany;4. Health Econometrics and Data Group, University of York, United Kingdom |
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| Abstract: | Health is strongly and positively correlated with education, which is one of many reasons to better understand the determinants of education. In this paper, we test for a specific type of family influence on education: genetic nurture. Specifically, we test whether a person’s educational attainment is correlated with their sibling’s polygenic score (PGS) for education, controlling for their own PGS. Models estimated using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) yield strong evidence of genetic nurture; a two-standard deviation increase in a sibling’s genetic predisposition to higher education is associated with a 13.6% point increase in the probability that the respondent has a college degree. Evidence of genetic nurture is robust to alternative measures of educational attainment and different measures of the polygenic score. An exploration of mechanisms suggests that omission of parental PGS explains no more than half of the estimated effect, and that the magnitude of the genetic nurture varies with the characteristics of the sibling. |
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| Keywords: | Genetics Peer effects Education |
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