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IZA Discussion Paper No. 15862
January 2023
Understanding Sibling Correlations in Education: Molecular Genetics and Family Background
Jason M. Fletcher, Qiongshi Lu, Bhashkar Mazumder, Jie Song

Sibling correlations in socioeconomic status are one of the key measures of equality 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 (polygenic scores, PGS) in order to gauge their relative importance compared with broader family background effects. We use >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.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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