Human Capital and Genetic Diversity

The determinants of human capital have been studied sparsely in the literature. Although there is a huge literature on the determinants of schooling linked with the quality of schooling, there are not many contributions that explore the deep determinants of investment in, quantity and quality of human capital. This paper investigates the relationship between human capital and the ancestral genetic diversity of populations. It highlights a strong hump-shaped relationship between genetic diversity and human capital. This means that some of the human capital achievements nowadays may root to the genetic diversity mostly determined many centuries ago. Results are robust to the introduction of several controls, to a consideration of a proxy for human capital in 1500 and to IV estimation.