Abstract
Studies analyzing the heritability of entrepreneurship indicate that explanations for why people engage in entrepreneurship that ignore genes are incomplete. However, despite promises that were solidly backed up with ex ante power calculations, attempts to identify specific genetic variants underlying the heritable variation in entrepreneurship have until now been unsuccessful. We describe the methodological issues hampering the identification of associations between genetic variants and entrepreneurship, but we also outline why this search will eventually be successful. Nevertheless, we argue that the benefits of using these individual genetic variants for empirical research in the entrepreneurship domain are likely to be small. Instead, the use of summary indices comprising multiple genetic variants, so-called polygenic risk scores, is advocated. In doing so, we stress the caveats associated with applying population-level results to the individual level. By drawing upon the promises of “genoeconomics,” we sketch how the use of genetic information may advance the field of entrepreneurship research.
Highlights
In 2000, the field of psychology concluded the naturenurture debate to be “over” by posing that all human behavioral traits are heritable (Turkheimer 2000)
The first question we address in the present study is “Why has the identification of robust associations between genetic variants and entrepreneurship been unsuccessful in the last decade?” We answer this question from a methodological point of view
The second question we address is “Would the identification of associations between genetic variants and entrepreneurship help to advance the field of entrepreneurship research?” Despite the unsuccessful attempts so far, we provide methodological and empirical reasons for why we may expect the identification of the first robust associations between genetic variants and entrepreneurship in the not too distant future
Summary
In 2000, the field of psychology concluded the naturenurture debate to be “over” by posing that all human behavioral traits are heritable (Turkheimer 2000). Since 2008, several studies have shown that this law holds for entrepreneurship (Nicolaou et al 2008a, b, 2010; Shane and Nicolaou 2015; Van der Loos et al 2013; Zhang et al 2009) Inspired by these findings and advances in genetics research, Koellinger et al (2010) provided a sketchy forecast in this journal of the expected identification of relationships between genetic variants and entrepreneurship. The results of the analyses show how polygenic risk scores constructed for a range of traits (and not just entrepreneurship) can help to identify regions in the human genome important for entrepreneurial behavior These analyses illustrate how polygenic risk scores can significantly predict entrepreneurship (even when proxied by the relatively episodic activity of self-employment).
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