Does Expanding Free Secondary Education Moderate the Relationship Between Genes and Socioeconomic Outcomes? Evidence from the Education Act of 1944 in England.

This study examines how the association between genes and socioeconomic outcomes— education, income, and wealth—was moderated by the Education Act of 1944 in England, an educational reform that abolished fees for secondary schools and extended compulsory schooling by raising the minimum school leaving age by one year. We identify the causal effect of the reform using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and a regression discontinuity design. Our main finding is that the reform reduced the association between the polygenic index for educational attainment and the socioeconomic outcomes by between one-fifth and one-third of a standard deviation. We interpret this as evidence that the reform increased equality of opportunity by reducing the association between genes and socioeconomic outcomes, a conclusion consistent with the luck-egalitarian approach in political philosophy. We find no evidence that the association between parental socioeconomic status and socioeconomic outcomes changed after the reform.