Genome-Wide Association Studies and the Genetics of Entrepreneurship

The recently developed genome-wide association study (GWAS) design enables to identify genes specifically associated with economic outcomes such as occupational and other choices. This is a promising new approach for economics research which we aim to apply to the choice for entrepreneurship. However, due to multiple testing issues, very large sample sizes are needed to differentiate between true and false positives. For a GWAS on entrepreneurship, we expect that a sample size of at least 30,000 observations is required. Finally, the interpretation of findings from GWAS on economic outcomes is not straightforward and some guidelines will be provided in this regard.