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Working Paper 34427
DOI 10.3386/w34427
Issue Date October 2025
The longstanding debate over whether human capabilities and skills are shaped more by ānatureā or ānurtureā has been revitalized by recent advances in genetics, particularly in the use of polygenic scores (PGSs) to proxy for genetic endowments. Yet, we argue that PGSs embed not only direct genetic effects but also indirect environmental influences, raising questions about their validity for causal analysis. We show that these conflated measures can mislead studies of geneāenvironment interactions, especially when parental behavior responds to childrenās genetiā¦
- Home
- Research
- Working Papers
- Modeling and Measuring the Geneticā¦
Working Paper 34427
DOI 10.3386/w34427
Issue Date October 2025
The longstanding debate over whether human capabilities and skills are shaped more by ānatureā or ānurtureā has been revitalized by recent advances in genetics, particularly in the use of polygenic scores (PGSs) to proxy for genetic endowments. Yet, we argue that PGSs embed not only direct genetic effects but also indirect environmental influences, raising questions about their validity for causal analysis. We show that these conflated measures can mislead studies of geneāenvironment interactions, especially when parental behavior responds to childrenās genetic risk. To address this issue, we construct a new latent measure of genetic risk that integrates individual genotypes with diagnostic symptoms, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health linked to restricted individual SNP-level genotypes from dbGaP. Exploiting multiple sources of variationāincluding the Mendelian within-family genetic randomization among siblingsāwe find consistent evidence that parents compensate by investing more in children with higher genetic risk for ADHD. Strikingly, these compensatory responses disappear when genetic risk is proxied by the conventional ADHD PGS, which also yields weakerāand in some cases reversedāpredictions for long-run outcomes. Finally, we embed our latent measure of genetic endowments into a standard dynamic structural model of child development. The model shows that both parental investments and latent genetic risk jointly shape childrenās cognitive and mental health development, underscoring the importance of modeling the dynamic interplay between genes and environments in the formation of human capital.
Copy Citation
Francesco Agostinelli and Zach Weingarten, āModeling and Measuring the Genetic Determinants of Child Development,ā NBER Working Paper 34427 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34427.
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