Henry Christopher Boone

PhD thesis:

Beyond Nature vs. Nurture: A Sociogenomic Analysis of Life Outcomes

My PhD research examines how genetic endowments and social environments interact to shape economic and life outcomes. Moving beyond a simple nature-versus-nurture distinction, I use sociogenomic methods to study how polygenic scores interact with family background, parental investment, education, and other features of the social environment. The project aims to identify when genetic predispositions are reinforced, moderated, or offset by differences in opportunity and resources. By combining large-scale longitudinal data with methods from applied microeconomics and social genomics, I hope to better understand the mechanisms through which advantage and disadvantage persist across generations. More broadly, the research asks how institutions and public policy can influence the extent to which circumstances at birth translate into unequal outcomes later in life.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

My interest in inequality has developed through increasingly focused research questions. At the Geneva Graduate Institute, I studied how institutions, information, and social environments shape development. At Trinity College Dublin, my dissertation on electricity pricing drew me toward heterogeneous household responses, financial constraints, and unequal welfare effects. At Cambridge, my research on housing burden and employment entry has deepened my interest in how fixed costs and resource constraints shape individual choices. I am especially interested in how inherited characteristics interact with parental investment, education, and opportunity, and where policy can interrupt the persistence of disadvantage across generations.