“The Nature and Nurture of Economic Outcomes”, 2002-05 ():
The relative importance of biology and environment is one of the oldest and most prominent areas of scientific inquiry and has been examined by researchers as diverse as David 1748, Charles Darwin 1859, and Sigmund 1930. Social scientists are particularly interested in the degree to which family and neighborhood environmental factors influence a child’s educational attainment and earnings.
The stakes in this debate are quite high and far-reaching. As Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray 1994 point out, the effectiveness of antipoverty and pro-education policies is largely dependent on the degree to which environment matters. Any claim of treatment effects from different family structures, different teachers, different peers, or different neighborhoods needs as a pre-condition that some aspects of environment are important to long-term outcomes. Attempts to understand the root causes of income inequality often involve trying to sort out the effects of family background from the effects of genetic endowments (see eg. Zvi Griliches and William 1972; Christopher 1972).
In this paper I use data on adoptees to identify the causal effect [on Korean adoptees] from being adopted into a [American] high-socioeconomic-status (SES) family versus a lower-SES family. I examine a range of outcomes including educational attainment, marital status, test scores, and the selectivity of college attended. [followup: 2007]