The DOI matches its Crossref record; 99 of the 99 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Social Science Methods for Twins Data: Integrating Causality, Endowments, and Heritability
Open accessAbstract
Twins have been extensively used in economics, sociology, and behavioral genetics to investigate the role of genetic endowments on a broad range of social, demographic, and economic outcomes. However, the focus in these literatures has been distinct.: The economic literature has been primarily concerned with the need to control for unobserved endowments--including as an important subset, genetic endowments--in analyses that attempt to establish the impact of one variable, often schooling, on a variety of economic, demographic, and health outcomes. Behavioral genetic analyses have mostly been concerned with decomposing the variation in the outcomes of interest into genetic, shared environmental, and non-shared environmental components, with recent multivariate analyses investigating the contributions of genes and the environment to the correlation and causation between variables. Despite the fact that twins studies and the recognition of the role of endowments are central to both of these literatures, they have mostly evolved independently. In this paper we develop formally the relationship between the economic and behavioral genetic approaches to the analyses of twins, and we develop an integrative approach that combines the identification of causal effects, which dominates the economic literature, with the decomposition of variances and covariances into genetic and environmental factors that are the primary goal of behavioral genetic approaches. We apply this integrative ACE-beta approach to an illustrative investigation of the impact of schooling on several demographic outcomes such as fertility and nuptiality and health.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“Kohler, Behrman, and Schnittker (2011, p. 91) noted that, “[T]wins have been extensively used to control for genetic and other background, unobserved, confounding factors.”
From Does contact with the justice system deter or promote future delinquency? Results from a longitudinal study of British adolescent twins (2020) · cites this paper as Kohler, Behrman, and Schnittker (2011)
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“Using the family fixed‐effects model (Kohler et al., 2011), we leveraged nationally representative twin data to take advantage of the natural experiment that twins provide by the fact that they share their family environment and their genetic endowments.”
From Does contact with the justice system deter or promote future delinquency? Results from a longitudinal study of British adolescent twins (2020) · cites this paper as Kohler et al., 2011
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments
Staiger, D., & Stock, J. H. (1997) · Econometrica · doi:10.2307/2171753 · Cited by 7,081
Methodology for Genetic Studies of Twins and Families
Neale, M. C., & Cardon, L. R. (1992) · doi:10.1007/978-94-015-8018-2 · Cited by 4,005
Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?
Angrist, J. D., & Krueger, A. B. (1991) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/2937954 · Cited by 2,565
Ury, C. M., & Cohn, E. (1980) · Southern Economic Journal · doi:10.2307/1057569 · Cited by 2,271
Testing for Weak Instruments in Linear IV Regression
Stock, J., & Yogo, M. (2002) · doi:10.3386/t0284 · Cited by 1,842
Cutler, D., Deaton, A., & Lleras‐Muney, A. (2006) · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.20.3.97 · Cited by 1,583
Education and Health: Evaluating Theories and Evidence
Cutler, D., & Lleras-Muney, A. (2006) · doi:10.3386/w12352 · Cited by 1,507
Encyclopedia of Statistics in Behavioral Science
(2005) · Wiley eBooks · doi:10.1002/0470013192 · Cited by 1,472
Sources of human psychological differences: the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart
Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A. (1990) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.2218526 · Cited by 1,373 · cited 2×
“Though some prominent datasets of twins raised apart exist (e.g., the Minnesota Study of Twins Raised Apart, [Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, and Tellegen 1990] or the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study on Aging [Björklund, Jäntti, and Solon 2005]), most twins data include twins that were raised together.”
BackgroundThe Relationship Between Education and Adult Mortality in the United States
Lleras-Muney, A. (2005) · Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1111/0034-6527.00329 · Cited by 1,282
Research works printed but not linked: 19
- Almond D., 2005, Q J Econs, 120, 131
- Amin V., 2010, Am Econ Rev (forthcoming)
- Amin V., 2010, Evidence from a sample of U.S. twins
- Amin V., 2010, Teenage motherhood and later life socioeconomic and health outcomes: Evidence from U.S. twin studies
- Amin V., 2010, Evidence from UK twins
- Ashenfelter O., 1994, Am Econ Rev, 84, 1157
- Behrman J. R., Demography.
- Behrman J. R., 2010, Social science methods for twin data. Unpublished book manuscript, Population Studies Center
- Behrman J. R., 1976, Am Econ Rev, 66, 436
- Bishop J., 1977, Reporting errors and the true return to schooling
- Buss D. M., 1985, Am Scien, 73, 47
- Cutler D. M., 2006, J Econ Lit, 20, 97
- Cutler D. M, 2007, The effects of social and economic policy on health
- 10.1375/twin.8.4.283 · DOI
- 10.1375/twin.4.3.131 · DOI
- Kohler H.-P., 2003, In Offspring: Human fertility behavior in biodemographic perspective, 46
- Neale, M. C., S. M. Boker, G. Xie, and H. H. Maes. 2006. Mx:Statistical modeling. (7th ed.). Richmond, V.A.: Medical College of Virginia, Department of Psychiatry. http://leuven08.org/pdf/MxManual.pdf (http://leuven08.org/pdf/MxManual.pdf) (Accessed: 2 May 2011).
- Plomin R., 2005, Behavioral genetics
- Winship C., 2000, Causal inferences in sociological studies (mimeo)
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility
Heckman, J. J., & Mosso, S. (2014) · Annual Review of Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080213-040753 · Cited by 940
Using genetic data to strengthen causal inference in observational research
Pingault, J.-B., O’Reilly, P. F., Schoeler, T., Ploubidis, G. B., Rijsdijk, F., & Dudbridge, F. (2018) · Nature Reviews Genetics · doi:10.1038/s41576-018-0020-3 · Cited by 444
Does More Schooling Reduce Hospitalization and Delay Mortality? New Evidence Based on Danish Twins
Behrman, J. R., Kohler, H., Jensen, V. M., Pedersen, D. A., Petersen, I., Bingley, P., & Christensen, K. (2011) · Demography · doi:10.1007/s13524-011-0052-1 · Cited by 120
Self-citationThe Relationship between Education and Mental Health: New Evidence from a Discordant Twin Study
Halpern-Manners, A., Schnabel, L., Hernandez, E. M., Silberg, J. L., & Eaves, L. J. (2016) · Social Forces · doi:10.1093/sf/sow035 · Cited by 130
Rising Educational Participation and the Trend to Later Childbearing
Neels, K., Murphy, M., Ní Bhrolcháin, M., & Beaujouan, É. (2017) · Population and Development Review · doi:10.1111/padr.12112 · Cited by 111
Metadata
- Authors
- Kohler, H.-P., Behrman, J. R., & Schnittker, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kohler, Hans-Peter
- Venue
- Biodemography and Social Biology
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2011-01-01
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 88-141
- ISSN
- 1948-5565 (ISSN-L)
- 1948-5573
- PMC
- PMC3158495
- OpenAlex
- W2013583398
- Cited by
- 116
- References
- 99
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 18.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Biodemography and Social Biology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) (submittedVersion)
- Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD043417, R01HD046144)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health › Assisted Reproductive Technology and Twin Pregnancy
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Genetic Associations and Epidemiology
- Keywords
- twins, genetic endowment, heritability, causal effects, behavioral genetics, school education, fertility, nuptiality, health outcomes, social science methodology
- MeSH terms
- Data Interpretation, Statistical, Economics, Epidemiologic Methods, Genetics, Behavioral, Humans, Models, Genetic, Causality, Twin Studies as Topic
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
