12th Annual IGSS Conference • October 28-29, 2021

Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences 2021

Understanding Sibling Correlations in Education: Molecular Genetics and Family Background

Bhash Mazumder, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Sibling correlations in socioeconomic status are one of the key measures of equal of opportunity and social mobility, providing an omnibus examination of the importance of family background. Typically, these correlations are interpreted as the combined effects of shared sibling background and experiences, including genetics and family environments. The UK Biobank allows us to specifically control for sibling and parental genetics in order to gauge their relative importance compared with broader family background effects. We deploy two complementary approaches from genetics and social science using the >17,000 sibling pairs from the UK Biobank in order to further decompose standard sibling correlations of educational attainment found in the literature. In general, we find modest (up to 20%) contributions of molecular genetics to the similarity of sibling outcomes, suggesting a large amount of the observed similarity in sibling educational outcomes are due to parents and environments of children.

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