Heritability of lifetime earnings

Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness.

That is from a newly published paper by Ari Hyytinen, Pekka Ilmakunnas, Edvard Johansson, and Otto Toivanen.