The DNA of Enterprise: Genetic Endowments, Entrepreneurship and Wealth Distribution 

Scholar: Qianyu Yang

Scholarship Period: 2024 - 2027

Entrepreneurship is central to both the level and persistence of wealth inequality. This paper studies the role of genetic endowments in shaping entrepreneurial selection, intergenerational mobility, and wealth concentration by combining polygenic score evidence with a structural overlapping-generations model. We show that genetic endowments for educational attainment and risk tolerance drive both entry into entrepreneurship and long-run survival. Quantitatively, they explain about 28 percent of intergenerational persistence and a comparable share of worker-to-entrepreneur transitions. At the individual level, they account for about 28 percent of the variation in lifetime entrepreneurial duration and 17 percent of lifetime utility. Genetic mechanisms are critical for the extreme right tail: eliminating intergenerational genetic transmission reduces the wealth gap between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent by over 90 percent. A policy experiment relaxing credit constraints reveals strong gene-by-environment interactions: gains are initially concentrated among high-endowment individuals, but become more broadly shared in the long run through dynastic wealth accumulation and intergenerational transfers.