Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a literature examining the effects of giving birth to sons on postmenopausal longevity in pre-industrial mothers. The original paper in this lineage used ...a sample (n=375) of Sami mothers from northern Finland and found that, relative to daughters, giving birth to sons substantially reduced maternal longevity. We examine this hypothesis using a similar and a much larger sample (n=930) of pre-industrial Sami women from northern Sweden, who in terms of their demographic, sociocultural and biological conditions, closely resemble the original study population. In contrast to the previously reported results for the Sami, we find no evidence of a negative effect of sons on maternal longevity. Thus, we provide the most compelling evidence to date that the leading result in the literature must be approached with scepticism.
WEALTH, HEALTH, AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT Cesarini, David; Lindqvist, Erik; Östling, Robert ...
The Quarterly journal of economics,
05/2016, Letnik:
131, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players’ own health and their children’s health and developmental outcomes. Our ...estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large as the cross-sectional wealth-mortality gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, including drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets, causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth-mortality gradients, nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income.
We examine the psychometric and empirical properties of some commonly used survey-based measures of risk preferences in a population-based sample of 11,000 twins. Using a model that provides a ...general framework for making inferences about the component of measured risk attitudes that is not due to measurement error, we show that measurement-error adjustment leads to substantially larger estimates of the predictive power of risk attitudes, of the size of the gender gap, and of the magnitude of the sibling correlation. Risk attitudes are predictive of investment decisions, entrepreneurship, and drinking and smoking behaviors; are robustly associated with cognitive ability and personality; and our estimates are often larger than those in the literature. Our results highlight the importance of adjusting for measurement error across a wide range of empirical settings.
We introduce multi-trait analysis of GWAS (MTAG), a method for joint analysis of summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of different traits, possibly from overlapping samples. ...We apply MTAG to summary statistics for depressive symptoms (N
= 354,862), neuroticism (N = 168,105), and subjective well-being (N = 388,538). As compared to the 32, 9, and 13 genome-wide significant loci identified in the single-trait GWAS (most of which are themselves novel), MTAG increases the number of associated loci to 64, 37, and 49, respectively. Moreover, association statistics from MTAG yield more informative bioinformatics analyses and increase the variance explained by polygenic scores by approximately 25%, matching theoretical expectations.
Experimental Game Theory and Behavior Genetics Cesarini, David; Dawes, Christopher T.; Johannesson, Magnus ...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
June 2009, Letnik:
1167, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We summarize the findings from a research program studying the heritability of behavior in a number of widely used economic games, including trust, dictator, and ultimatum games. Results from the ...standard behavior genetic variance decomposition suggest that strategies and fundamental economic preference parameters are moderately heritable, with estimates ranging from 18 to 42%. In addition, we also report new evidence on so‐called “hyperfair” preferences in the ultimatum game. We discuss the implications of our findings with special reference to current efforts that seek to understand the molecular genetic architecture of complex social behaviors.
Windfall gains and stock market participation Briggs, Joseph; Cesarini, David; Lindqvist, Erik ...
Journal of financial economics,
January 2021, 2021-01-00, 20210101, 2021, Letnik:
139, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We exploit the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in a large administrative Swedish data set to estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation. A $150,000 windfall gain ...increases the stock market participation probability by 12 percentage points among prelottery nonparticipants but has no discernible effect on prelottery stock owners. A structural life cycle model significantly overpredicts entry rates even for very high entry costs (up to $31,000). Additional analyses implicate pessimistic beliefs regarding equity returns as a major source of this overprediction and suggest that both recent and early-life return realizations affect beliefs.
This article analyzes a rich Swedish data set with information on the electoral turnout of a large sample of adoptees, their siblings, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. We use a ...simple regression framework to decompose the parent-child resemblance in voting into pre-birth factors, measured by biological parents’ voting, and post-birth factors, measured by adoptive parents’ voting. Adoptees are more likely to vote if their biological parents were voters and if they were assigned to families in which the adoptive parents vote. We find evidence of interactions between the pre- and post-birth factors: the effect of the post-birth environment on turnout is greater amongst adoptees whose biological mothers are nonvoters. We also show that the relationships between parental characteristics, such as education, and child turnout, persist even in the absence of a genetic link between parent and child. The regression-based framework we utilize provides a basis for the integration of behavior-genetic research into mainstream political science.
Companies have recently begun to sell a new service to patients considering in vitro fertilization: embryo selection based on polygenic scores (ESPS). These scores represent individualized ...predictions of health and other outcomes derived from genomewide association studies in adults to partially predict these outcomes. This article includes a discussion of many factors that lower the predictive power of polygenic scores in the context of embryo selection and quantifies these effects for a variety of clinical and nonclinical traits. Also discussed are potential unintended consequences of ESPS (including selecting for adverse traits, altering population demographics, exacerbating inequalities in society, and devaluing certain traits). Recommendations for the responsible communication about ESPS by practitioners are provided, and a call for a society-wide conversation about this technology is made. (Funded by the National Institute on Aging and others.).
Intelligence is associated with important economic and health-related life outcomes. Despite intelligence having substantial heritability (0.54) and a confirmed polygenic nature, initial genetic ...studies were mostly underpowered. Here we report a meta-analysis for intelligence of 78,308 individuals. We identify 336 associated SNPs (METAL P < 5 × 10
) in 18 genomic loci, of which 15 are new. Around half of the SNPs are located inside a gene, implicating 22 genes, of which 11 are new findings. Gene-based analyses identified an additional 30 genes (MAGMA P < 2.73 × 10
), of which all but one had not been implicated previously. We show that the identified genes are predominantly expressed in brain tissue, and pathway analysis indicates the involvement of genes regulating cell development (MAGMA competitive P = 3.5 × 10
). Despite the well-known difference in twin-based heritability for intelligence in childhood (0.45) and adulthood (0.80), we show substantial genetic correlation (r
= 0.89, LD score regression P = 5.4 × 10
). These findings provide new insight into the genetic architecture of intelligence.
PDF
