Research by Dilnoza Muslimova, Hans van Kippersluis, Niels Rietveld and collaborators, has been published in the Journal of Labor Economics

What matters more for your life outcomes: your genes (‘nature’) or your life experiences and the way you were raised (‘nurture’)? In our study, we investigate how nature and nurture interact to affect education. We use DNA data to create a score that measures the likelihood to succeed in education – which we refer to as the genetic ‘endowment’ – while we focus on birth order as a measure of the environment, because family size puts a natural constraint on parental time investments. We first replicate a well-known fact from the literature: firstborns, on average, achieve more education than their laterborn siblings. Importantly, however, we show that this difference is significantly larger for firstborns with high genetic endowments for education compared to those with lower genetic endowments. Furthermore, our results argue against ideas of genetic or environmental determinism (the belief that one’s behaviour is solely controlled by genetics or environments). Instead, genes and environment interact in important ways. Studying this interplay is crucial to better understand how nature and nurture jointly shape life outcomes.

Abstract
Firstborns, on average, complete more education than laterborns. We study whether individuals’ endowments measured by genetic information amplify this effect. Our family-fixed effects approach allows exploiting exogenous variation in birth order and genetic endowments among 14,850 siblings in the UK Biobank. We find that those with higher genetic endowments benefit disproportionately more from being firstborn compared to those with lower endowments, providing a clean example of how nature and nurture interact in producing human capital. Since parental investments are a dominant channel driving birth order effects, our results are consistent with complementarity between endowments and investments in human capital formation.

Article citation

Dilnoza Muslimova, Hans van Kippersluis, Cornelius A. Rietveld, Stephanie von Hinke, Fleur W. Meddens. 'Gene-environment complementarity ineducational attainment,' Journal of Labor Economics, doi.org/10.1086/734087