Abstract
Candidate gene studies of human behavior are gaining interest in economics and entrepreneurship research. Performing and interpreting these studies is not straightforward because the selection of candidates influences the interpretation of the results. As an example, Nicolaou et al. (Small Bus Econ 36:151-155, 2011) report a significant association between a common genetic variant in the DRD3 gene and the tendency to be an entrepreneur. We fail to replicate this finding using a much larger, independent dataset. In addition, we discuss the candidate gene approach and give suggestions to avoid the publication of false positives.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 269-275 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Small Business Economics |
Volume | 37 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Oct 2011 |
Funding
Acknowledgments We would like to thank Dr. Tobias A. Knoch, Anis Abuseiris, Karol Estrada, Luc V. de Zeeuw, and Rob de Graaf, as well as their institutions, the Erasmus Grid Office, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and especially the national German MediGRID and Services@MediGRID part of the German D-Grid, both funded by the German Bundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technology under grants # 01 AK 803 A-H and # 01 IG 07015 G for access to their grid resources.
Keywords
- Candidate gene study
- Entrepreneurship
- Genetics
- Genome-wide association study