Correlations between Socioeconomic Status (SES) and Biogeographic Ancestries: Indirect Evidence of SES Model Misspecification

New genomic technologies allow the apportionment of individuals’ genotyped DNA into admixture proportions traceable to historically isolated biogeographic ancestry (BGA) groups such as African, European, and Amerindian. These BGA admixture proportions have proven valuable in a wide range of recent epidemiological research. This paper performs a meta-analysis of these epidemiological studies and finds that, as an ancillary result, these studies reveal consistent patterns of correlation between BGA admixture proportions and socio-economic status (SES). Given this finding, the absence of BGA admixture proportions data from almost all extant economic analysis of individuals’ susceptibility to high/low socioeconomic status is indirect evidence for a non-negligible omitted-variable bias in such analysis. Economic models of SES which do not consider BGA as a possible explanatory variable may be unreliable due to the potential confounding associated with this omitted variable.