Working Paper: NBER ID: w28750
Authors: Silvia H. Barcellos; Leandro Carvalho; Patrick Turley
Abstract: This paper investigates whether education weakens the relationship between early-life disadvantages and later-life SES. We use three proxies for advantage that we show are independently associated with SES in middle-age. Besides early, favorable family and neighborhood conditions, we argue that the genes a child inherits also represent a source of advantages. Using a regression discontinuity design and data for over 110,000 individuals, we study a compulsory schooling reform in the UK that generated exogenous variation in schooling. While the reform succeeded in reducing educational disparities, it did not weaken the relationship between early-life disadvantages and wages. This implies that advantaged children had higher returns to schooling. We exploit family-based random genetic variation and find no evidence that these higher returns were driven by genetically-influenced individual characteristics such as innate ability or skills.
Keywords: education; socioeconomic status; genetics; early-life disadvantages
JEL Codes: I24; I26; J31
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| education (I29) | relationship between early-life disadvantages and later-life SES (I24) |
| compulsory schooling reform (I21) | educational attainment (I21) |
| compulsory schooling reform (I21) | wages for children in the top tercile of the EA PGI (J31) |
| additional year of schooling (I23) | returns to schooling for children from more advantaged backgrounds (I24) |