Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/272489 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 15862
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
sibling correlations
educational mobility
genetics
JEL: 
J62
J12
J24
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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