20 years of earnings data on Finnish twins: About 40% of the variance of women’s & little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors; shared environment contribution is negligible

Heritability of lifetime earnings. Ari Hyytinen & Pekka Ilmakunnas & Edvard Johansson & Otto Toivanen. The Journal of Economic Inequality, May 14 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-019-09413-x

Abstract: Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness.

Keywords Earnings inequality . Heritability . Twins . Genetics