The goal of this project is to empirically test the theory of human capital formation, where skills at a certain age are influenced by lagged skills and investments. Incorporating genetic information in the framework provides a novel approach to proxying for the previously unobserved ‘endowments’ or ‘skills’. The project will investigate to what extent schooling environments exert differential effects depending on individuals’ genetic make-up. Our current work provides suggestive evidence that students with low polygenic scores benefit more from teacher quality than those with high polygenic scores. We will build on this work, strengthening the identification strategy to allow the clean identification of causal effects. For that, we will use the National Pupil Database to calculate school value-added measures with respect to standardized tests in English, Maths, and Science. We will match these data to genotyped parent-child trios in the Millennium Cohort Study to identify the complementarity of teacher quality and genetic endowments. We will use ALSPAC and MoBa to expand these analyses to account for the multidimensionality of teacher value-added (i.e. cognitive versus non-cognitive skills) and explore teacher effects on life chances beyond education.
This project is hosted at University of Bristol.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 programme under grant agreement number 101073237
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