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Does the genetic influence on education change across neighbourhoods?
Building: Main Venue Building
Room: room 7
Date: 2017-02-10 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Last modified: 2017-01-23
Abstract
This paper investigates if neighborhood characteristics such as education, unemployment and poverty level mitigate the genetic predisposition to higher educational attainment. Using polygenic score (PGS) provided by the Add-Health study, we test the existence of an interaction between neighborhood characteristics at Wave I and genetic score in shaping future educational attainment measured at Wave IV. Our preliminary results show that polygenic score has no predictive value in a deprived context, while it is strongly associated with education in neighborhoods with higher proportion of college educated parents.
Keywords
gene-environment interactions; educational attainment; sociogenetics; contextual factors.