 Genetic nurture in educational attainmentJohn Cawley, Euna Han, Jiyoon Kim and Edward Norton Economics & Human Biology, 2023, vol. 49, issue C 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. Keywords: Genetics; Peer effects; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:49:y:2023:i:c:s1570677x23000205 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2023.101239 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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