“Genetic Fortune: Winning or Losing Education, Income, and Health”, 2020-09-01 (; similar):
We study the effects of genetic endowments on inequalities in education, income, and health. Specifically, we conduct the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) of individual income, using data from individuals of European ancestries.
We find that ≈10% of the variance in occupational wages can be attributed to genetic similarities between individuals who are only very distantly related to each other. Our GWAS (N = 282,963) identifies 45 independent genetic loci for occupational wages, each with a tiny effect size (R2 < 0.04%). An aggregated genetic score constructed from these GWAS results accounts for ≈1% of the variance in self-reported income in two independent samples (N = 29,440) and improves upon the variance captured by a genetic score obtained from previous GWAS results for educational attainment. A one-standard-deviation increase in our genetic score for occupational wages is associated with a 6–8% increase in self-reported hourly wages.
We exploit random genetic differences between ~35,000 biological siblings to show that:
roughly half of the covariance between our genetic score and socioeconomic outcomes is causal
genetic luck for higher income is linked with better health outcomes in late adulthood, and
having a college degree partly mediates this relationship.
We also demonstrate that the returns to schooling remain substantial even after controlling for genetic confounds, with an average of 8–11% higher hourly wages for each additional year of education obtained in a US sample.
Thus, the implications of genetic endowments are malleable, for example, via policies targeting education.
[Keywords: Income, education, health, inequality, heritability, genetics, polygenic score]