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

Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences 2021

Genes, Maternal Education, and Inequalities in Human Capital: Evidence from a British Cohort

Gabriella Conti, Department of Economics, University College London

Recent advances have led to the discovery of specific genetic variants that predict educational attainment. We study how these variants, summarized as a linear index–known as a polygenic score–are associated with human capital accumulation and how they interact with parental education by using novel genetic data available in the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and in the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), respectively the 1958 and the 2000 British birth cohorts. We present two main sets of results. First, we show that, in both cohorts, the polygenic score is highly predictive of cognitive and socioemotional development, parental investments, educational attainment, and health and socioeconomic outcomes since childhood until adulthood; in the MCS, this is also true once we condition on the parental polygenic scores. Second, we find evidence that the genetic factors measured by this score interact strongly with parental education in affecting human capital in the offspring. In particular, by exploiting exogenous variation in parental education induced by two schooling reforms in the UK, we consistently find across both cohorts that the impact of parental education on child human capital is bigger with children with high genetic endowments. Our findings uncover a potential mechanism through which the interplay of genes and environments amplifies inequalities in human capital across generations.

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