November 2024

IZA DP No. 17476: Heritability in the Labour Market: Evidence from Italian Twins

Sonia Brescianini, Lorenzo Cappellari, Daniele Checchi

We use administrative data on educational attainments and life-time earnings to study their correlations among Italian twins. Using the ACE decomposition, we find that heritability in education accounts to almost half of the variance, especially for younger birth cohorts. With respect to labour market outcomes, we find that only for the oldest cohorts there is a greater share of inequality that can be attributed to idiosyncratic factors compared to education, and symmetrically a lower share due to genetics, while the impact of shared environment remains stable among the youngest cohorts. We suggest that increased employment flexibility may be responsible for the decline in the environmental component. Using a larger sample of pseudo-twins (individuals sharing birth date, birth place and family name) we confirm previous results, providing evidence that heritability also drives labour market attachment and prosocial behaviour.