Rapidly increasing inequality over the past few decades has fuelled a growing interest in the question of why wealthy parents tend to have wealthy children, and why healthy parents tend to have healthy children. This ESR project will use genetic and epigenetic data as well as rich environmental characteristics on multiple generations in Generation R and Lifelines to explore the extent to which intergenerational persistence of health and wealth have environmental and genetic origins.
The benchmark model is a simple regression of a child’s outcome (e.g., birth weight, education) on the outcome of the parent to quantify intergenerational persistence. We will then use Oaxaca-decomposition methods to quantify the relative contribution of genetic and environmental characteristics. Finally, we go beyond the descriptive evidence in three ways.
First, by employing genetic data on both parents and children, we can identify causal genetic effects. Second, we will exploit exogenous variation in parental environments to study causal environmental effects. And third, we will be actively studying interactions between genetic and environmental channels, through analyses that interact polygenic scores with environmental characteristics, but also through epigenetic studies (e.g., an epigenome-wide association study). The findings will be compared to the findings from ESR3, which has a similar goal but uses the Norwegian MoBa cohort and focuses on educational attainment.
This project is hosted at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 programme under grant agreement number 101073237
essgn.org 