Heritability of lifetime earnings

Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alte...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of economic inequality Vol. 17; no. 3; pp. 319 - 335
Main Authors Hyytinen, Ari, Ilmakunnas, Pekka, Johansson, Edvard, Toivanen, Otto
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.09.2019
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Development Economics
Economic Growth
Economics
Economics and Finance
International Economics
Investor behavior
Political Science
Public Finance
Twins
Sweden
Finland
Genetics
Heritability
Earnings inequality
Twins
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Summary:Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness.
ISSN:1569-1721
1573-8701
DOI:10.1007/s10888-019-09413-x