November 12, 2025
Helsinki, Finland
Education is a major source of inequality in income and health. Polygenic indices for educational attainment (EA-PGI) capture both direct and indirect genetic influences on education, but their effects on income and health trajectories remain unclear. Using Finnish registry data on 51,735 graduates (972,897 person-year observations) followed annually since graduation for up to 25 years, we report four findings. First, higher EA-PGI does not predict higher income at labor market entry. Instead, it strongly predicts subsequent income growth, but only among higher-educated people: tertiary-educated graduates at the 90th percentile earn €45 612 (13.2 %) higher lifetime income than those at the 10th percentile. Second, EA-PGI does not predict the quality of the first employer but rather a higher job-to-job mobility toward better-paying firms, which drives the long-run income divergence. Third, controlling for parental EA-PGI reduces the lifetime income gap to €13 003. Finally, the above results are unlikely to be mediated by health, since EA-PGI only weakly predicts disease burden.