Polygenic autism risk is positively genetically correlated with educational attainment[16] (and cognitive ability[54], a highly genetically correlated trait[57]), possibly consistent with the hypothesis that common autism risk variants persist in the population due to compensatory effects on cognitive ability [55,56]. If so, then most common variants affecting autism risk would also affect educational attainment, leading to a partially genetically causal effect of autism on educational attainment. However, we detected evidence against such an effect (gcp^ = 0.13(0.13), ρ^g = 0.23(0.07); Supplementary Table 12). Additional trait pairs with negative results are reported in the Supplementary Note and in Supplementary Table 14.
