Are you left-handed? That's bad news (unless your mother is also a lefty)

Leonardo Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Albert Einstein, Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, Henry Ford and Pelé.

It would be hard to argue that these people did not reach the absolute peak of their chosen fields of endeavour. But, according to new study, they did so against the odds; they were (or are) all left handed.

The research runs contrary to popular perceptions that lefties are disproportionately more talented than their right-handed peers. The author of the new study says that this mistaken belief is based on unrepresentative anecdotal evidence such as the fact that four of the last seven US presidents - including Barack Obama - have been left-handed.

In fact, Joshua Goodman, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has found that southpaws - who account for roughly 12pc of the population - have many disadvantages compared to their right-handed peers.

In his study The Wages of Sinistrality: Handedness, Brain Structure, and Human Capital Accumulation, Goodman writes: "Lefties exhibit economically and statistically significant human capital deficits relative to righties." He argues that this is still true even when you take into account factors like infant health and the subject's family background.

Goodman studied data collected in both the US and the UK assessing a number of different age groups. He writes: "Compared to righties, lefties score a tenth of a standard deviation lower on measures of cognitive skills. Lefties have more emotional and behavioural problems, have more learning difficulties such as dyslexia, complete less schooling, and work in occupations requiring less cognitive skill."

Overall, Goodman concludes that left-handed people are likely to earn 10pc to 12pc less than right-handers, which he says is roughly equivalent to them having received a year's less schooling.

Goodman points out that left-handedness has long been viewed with suspicion: "During the Middle Ages, left-handed writers were thought to be possessed by the Devil, generating the modern sense of the word sinister from sinistra, the Latin word for left. The English word left itself comes from the Old English lyft, meaning idle, weak, or useless. The French word for left, gauche, also means clumsy or awkward."

But why do left-handed people suffer these disadvantages?

Goodman claims to have found a correlation between low-birth rate, which would appear to suggest trauma in-utero, and left-handedness. Goodman argues that this suggests there are two types of lefty: those whose left-handedness is in their DNA - genetic lefties - and those whose left-handedness appears to have been caused by trauma or stress during their mothers' pregnancy - environmental lefties.

Left-handers whose mother was also left handed - which indicates genetic left-handedness - do not suffer from the differences in cognitive ability with the rest of the population, according to the report.

Goodman's study found that the right-handed children of left-handed mothers also appear to have "cognitive deficits". In a separate blog, the economist wrote: "In other words, mismatch between the handedness of parents and kids may be as important as handedness itself."