Social and Genetic Effects on Educational Performance in Early Adolescence

Martin A. Isungset, Dalton Conley, Henrik D. Zachrisson, Eivind Ystrøm, Alexandra Havdahl, Pål R. Njølstad and Torkild H. Lyngstad

No 28498, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Research into the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage has long been criticized for not paying sufficient attention to genetics. This study is based on the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) and administrative register data on 25000 genotyped Norwegian children and their parents. We assess and disentangle the relative importance of genetics and social background for children’s standardized academic test scores. Norway offers a particularly interesting context for intergenerational transmission, as the welfare state and educational system is designed to provide equal opportunity structures for children. The results point to genetics only confounding the parent status-offspring achievement relationship to a small degree, to ‘genetic nurture’ effects being small, and pro-vide no evidence of neither Scarr-Rowe interactions in test scores nor parent-child genotype interactions. Even in a universal welfare state with relatively low levels of inequality, there are two systems of ascription, one genetic and one social, and these are largely independent of each other.

JEL-codes: I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02
Note: CH ED EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28498.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:nbr:nberwo:28498

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28498

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().