Author(s)
Pietro Biroli
Nicolau Martin-Bassols
Andries Marees
Hans van Kippersluis
Cornelius Rietveld
Pia Arce
Kevin Thom
Stephanie von Hinke
Jeremy Vollen
Titus Galama

The start of a human’s life can be characterized by two lotteries: that of your genes (nature) and the family you were born into (nurture). These set in motion a trajectory, from birth onward, in health and human capital. Leveraging three longitudinal socialscience data sets, we systematically analyze the relationship between an individual’s genotype, the socioeconomic status (SES) of the families they grew up in, and their realized traits in adulthood. We proxy an individual’s genetic predisposition by polygenic indexes (PGIs) and family SES by a latent factor of parental education and father’s (former) occupational status. We then investigate how PGIs, parental SES, and their interaction contribute to later-life outcomes across a range of forty-five socioeconomic, anthropometric, health, behavioral, and personality traits. We find strong genetic and socioeconomic associations with these phenotypes, but no evidence of sizable gene-environment interactions.

Publication Type
Working Paper
File Description
First version, April 2026
JEL Codes
I14: Health and Inequality
I00: Health, Education, and Welfare: General
J24: Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
Keywords
gene-by-environment interplay
genoeconomics
polygenic indices
social sciences genetics
ESSGN