IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32404.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Social-Science Genomics: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel J. Benjamin
  • David Cesarini
  • Patrick Turley
  • Alexander Strudwick Young

Abstract

Rapid progress has been made in identifying links between human genetic variation and social and behavioral phenotypes. Applications in mainstream economics are beginning to emerge. This review aims to provide the background needed to bring the interested economist to the frontier of social-science genomics. Our review is structured around a theoretical framework that nests many of the key methods, concepts and tools found in the literature. We clarify key assumptions and appropriate interpretations. After reviewing several significant applications, we conclude by outlining future advances in genetics that will expand the scope of potential applications, and we discuss the ethical and communication challenges that arise in this area of research.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel J. Benjamin & David Cesarini & Patrick Turley & Alexander Strudwick Young, 2024. "Social-Science Genomics: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions," NBER Working Papers 32404, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32404
    Note: AG EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32404.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Qianqian Zhang & Florian Privé & Bjarni Vilhjálmsson & Doug Speed, 2021. "Improved genetic prediction of complex traits from individual-level data or summary statistics," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 12(1), pages 1-9, December.
    2. Akl C. Fahed & Anthony A. Philippakis & Amit V. Khera, 2022. "The potential of polygenic scores to improve cost and efficiency of clinical trials," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-4, December.
    3. Ben Brumpton & Eleanor Sanderson & Karl Heilbron & Fernando Pires Hartwig & Sean Harrison & Gunnhild Åberge Vie & Yoonsu Cho & Laura D. Howe & Amanda Hughes & Dorret I. Boomsma & Alexandra Havdahl & J, 2020. "Avoiding dynastic, assortative mating, and population stratification biases in Mendelian randomization through within-family analyses," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 11(1), pages 1-13, December.
    4. Clare Bycroft & Colin Freeman & Desislava Petkova & Gavin Band & Lloyd T. Elliott & Kevin Sharp & Allan Motyer & Damjan Vukcevic & Olivier Delaneau & Jared O’Connell & Adrian Cortes & Samantha Welsh &, 2018. "The UK Biobank resource with deep phenotyping and genomic data," Nature, Nature, vol. 562(7726), pages 203-209, October.
    5. Ronald de Vlaming & Aysu Okbay & Cornelius A Rietveld & Magnus Johannesson & Patrik K E Magnusson & André G Uitterlinden & Frank J A van Rooij & Albert Hofman & Patrick J F Groenen & A Roy Thurik & Ph, 2017. "Meta-GWAS Accuracy and Power (MetaGAP) Calculator Shows that Hiding Heritability Is Partially Due to Imperfect Genetic Correlations across Studies," PLOS Genetics, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(1), pages 1-23, January.
    6. Alkes L Price & Agnar Helgason & Snaebjorn Palsson & Hreinn Stefansson & David St. Clair & Ole A Andreassen & David Reich & Augustine Kong & Kari Stefansson, 2009. "The Impact of Divergence Time on the Nature of Population Structure: An Example from Iceland," PLOS Genetics, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(6), pages 1-10, June.
    7. Hans Kippersluis & Pietro Biroli & Rita Dias Pereira & Titus J. Galama & Stephanie Hinke & S. Fleur W. Meddens & Dilnoza Muslimova & Eric A. W. Slob & Ronald Vlaming & Cornelius A. Rietveld, 2023. "Overcoming attenuation bias in regressions using polygenic indices," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-16, December.
    8. Hyunseung Kang & Anru Zhang & T. Tony Cai & Dylan S. Small, 2016. "Instrumental Variables Estimation With Some Invalid Instruments and its Application to Mendelian Randomization," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 111(513), pages 132-144, March.
    9. Stephen Burgess & Christopher N Foley & Elias Allara & James R Staley & Joanna M. M. Howson, 2020. "A robust and efficient method for Mendelian randomization with hundreds of genetic variants," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 11(1), pages 1-11, December.
    10. Hastie, Nicholas D. & van der Loos, Matthijs J. H. M. & Vitart, Veronique & Völzke, Henry & Wellmann, Jürgen & Yu, Lei & Zhao, Wei & Allik, Jüri & Attia, John R. & Bandinelli, Stefania & Bastardot,, 2013. "GWAS of 126,559 Individuals Identifies Genetic Variants Associated with Educational Attainment," Scholarly Articles 13383543, Harvard University Department of Economics.
    11. Joel Becker & Casper A. P. Burik & Grant Goldman & Nancy Wang & Hariharan Jayashankar & Michael Bennett & Daniel W. Belsky & Richard Karlsson Linnér & Rafael Ahlskog & Aaron Kleinman & David A. Hinds , 2021. "Resource profile and user guide of the Polygenic Index Repository," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 5(12), pages 1744-1758, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hans Kippersluis & Pietro Biroli & Rita Dias Pereira & Titus J. Galama & Stephanie Hinke & S. Fleur W. Meddens & Dilnoza Muslimova & Eric A. W. Slob & Ronald Vlaming & Cornelius A. Rietveld, 2023. "Overcoming attenuation bias in regressions using polygenic indices," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-16, December.
    2. Barban, Nicola & De Cao, Elisabetta & Oreffice, Sonia & Quintana-Domeque, Climent, 2021. "The effect of education on spousal education: A genetic approach," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    3. von Hinke, Stephanie & Sørensen, Emil N., 2023. "The long-term effects of early-life pollution exposure: Evidence from the London smog," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    4. Nicola Barban & Elisabetta De Cao & Sonia Oreffice & Climent Quintana-Domeque, 2016. "Assortative Mating on Education: A Genetic Assessment," Working Papers 2016-034, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    5. Yuanyuan Yu & Lei Hou & Xu Shi & Xiaoru Sun & Xinhui Liu & Yifan Yu & Zhongshang Yuan & Hongkai Li & Fuzhong Xue, 2022. "Impact of nonrandom selection mechanisms on the causal effect estimation for two-sample Mendelian randomization methods," PLOS Genetics, Public Library of Science, vol. 18(3), pages 1-21, March.
    6. Thomas Buser & Rafael Ahlskog & Magnus Johannesson & Sven Oskarsson, 2022. "Occupational sorting on genes," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 22-062/I, Tinbergen Institute, revised 29 Mar 2023.
    7. Stephanie von Hinke & Nicolai Vitt, 2024. "An analysis of the accuracy of retrospective birth location recall using sibling data," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-13, December.
    8. James P. Pirruccello & Paolo Achille & Seung Hoan Choi & Joel T. Rämö & Shaan Khurshid & Mahan Nekoui & Sean J. Jurgens & Victor Nauffal & Shinwan Kany & Kenney Ng & Samuel F. Friedman & Puneet Batra , 2024. "Deep learning of left atrial structure and function provides link to atrial fibrillation risk," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-17, December.
    9. Pereira, Rita & Biroli, Pietro & von hinke, stephanie & Van Kippersluis, Hans & Galama, Titus & Rietveld, Niels & Thom, Kevin, 2022. "Gene-Environment Interplay in the Social Sciences," OSF Preprints d96z3, Center for Open Science.
    10. Cornelius A. Rietveld & Eric A.W. Slob & A. Roy Thurik, 2021. "A decade of research on the genetics of entrepreneurship: a review and view ahead," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 57(3), pages 1303-1317, October.
    11. Hazewinkel, Audinga-Dea & Richmond, Rebecca C. & Wade, Kaitlin H. & Dixon, Padraig, 2022. "Mendelian randomization analysis of the causal impact of body mass index and waist-hip ratio on rates of hospital admission," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 44(C).
    12. Ruoyu Wang & Qihua Wang & Wang Miao, 2023. "A robust fusion-extraction procedure with summary statistics in the presence of biased sources," Biometrika, Biometrika Trust, vol. 110(4), pages 1023-1040.
    13. Jiacheng Miao & Hanmin Guo & Gefei Song & Zijie Zhao & Lin Hou & Qiongshi Lu, 2023. "Quantifying portable genetic effects and improving cross-ancestry genetic prediction with GWAS summary statistics," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-13, December.
    14. David R. Blair & Thomas J. Hoffmann & Joseph T. Shieh, 2022. "Common genetic variation associated with Mendelian disease severity revealed through cryptic phenotype analysis," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-15, December.
    15. A. Roy Thurik & David B. Audretsch & Jörn H. Block & Andrew Burke & Martin A. Carree & Marcus Dejardin & Cornelius A. Rietveld & Mark Sanders & Ute Stephan & Johan Wiklund, 2024. "The impact of entrepreneurship research on other academic fields," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 62(2), pages 727-751, February.
    16. Bradley Jermy & Kristi Läll & Brooke N. Wolford & Ying Wang & Kristina Zguro & Yipeng Cheng & Masahiro Kanai & Stavroula Kanoni & Zhiyu Yang & Tuomo Hartonen & Remo Monti & Julian Wanner & Omar Yousse, 2024. "A unified framework for estimating country-specific cumulative incidence for 18 diseases stratified by polygenic risk," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-14, December.
    17. Matteo Di Scipio & Mohammad Khan & Shihong Mao & Michael Chong & Conor Judge & Nazia Pathan & Nicolas Perrot & Walter Nelson & Ricky Lali & Shuang Di & Robert Morton & Jeremy Petch & Guillaume Paré, 2023. "A versatile, fast and unbiased method for estimation of gene-by-environment interaction effects on biobank-scale datasets," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-15, December.
    18. Vincent Michaud & Eulalie Lasseaux & David J. Green & Dave T. Gerrard & Claudio Plaisant & Tomas Fitzgerald & Ewan Birney & Benoît Arveiler & Graeme C. Black & Panagiotis I. Sergouniotis, 2022. "The contribution of common regulatory and protein-coding TYR variants to the genetic architecture of albinism," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-8, December.
    19. Natalie DeForest & Yuqi Wang & Zhiyi Zhu & Jacqueline S. Dron & Ryan Koesterer & Pradeep Natarajan & Jason Flannick & Tiffany Amariuta & Gina M. Peloso & Amit R. Majithia, 2024. "Genome-wide discovery and integrative genomic characterization of insulin resistance loci using serum triglycerides to HDL-cholesterol ratio as a proxy," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-17, December.
    20. Dick Schijven & Sourena Soheili-Nezhad & Simon E. Fisher & Clyde Francks, 2024. "Exome-wide analysis implicates rare protein-altering variants in human handedness," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-12, December.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D87 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Neuroeconomics
    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • Q57 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Ecological Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32404. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.