Heritability in the Labour Market: Evidence from Italian Twins

Sonia Brescianini, Lorenzo Cappellari (lorenzo.cappellari@unicatt.it) and Daniele Checchi
Additional contact information
Sonia Brescianini: Istituto Superiore di Sanità
Lorenzo Cappellari: LISER

No 17476, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We use administrative data on educational attainments and life-time earnings to study their correlations among Italian twins. Using the ACE decomposition, we find that heritability in education accounts to almost half of the variance, especially for younger birth cohorts. With respect to labour market outcomes, we find that only for the oldest cohorts there is a greater share of inequality that can be attributed to idiosyncratic factors compared to education, and symmetrically a lower share due to genetics, while the impact of shared environment remains stable among the youngest cohorts. We suggest that increased employment flexibility may be responsible for the decline in the environmental component. Using a larger sample of pseudo-twins (individuals sharing birth date, birth place and family name) we confirm previous results, providing evidence that heritability also drives labour market attachment and prosocial behaviour.

Keywords: heritability; inequality; labour market outcomes; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 E21 I24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2024-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17476.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17476

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
library@iza.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte (hinte@iza.org).