Little is known about how much of childhood advantage persists across generations and through which mechanisms. We use birth order as a proxy for childhood advantage and study its intergenerational transmission using Dutch administrative data. A unique feature of our setting is that both generations are 'treated' with the same treatment, allowing us to test whether a repeated 'firstborn' advantage produces intergenerational complementarities. We find that 18 percent of the income advantages are transmitted, with no evidence of complementarities across generations. Novel mediation analyses show that differences in partner choice, fertility, and neighborhoods explain nearly half of the transmitted advantage.

This paper introduces new approaches to measure intergenerational transmission with detailed family information. I link 1.7 million Dutch children to 91 family-background characteristics to provide the first estimates of how long-run income varies across the full family-background distribution, including the tails. Compared to traditional approaches using parental income only, I document considerably larger income gaps across families and smaller gaps across neighborhoods. The mean-income gap between children from the least and most advantaged families widens from 42 to 61 ranks, while cross-neighborhood variation in upward mobility falls by over half. These results matter for policymakers targeting disadvantaged families and neighborhoods.

Many higher education programs dismiss students who perform below some academic standard. Policymakers often justify these rules as a way to incentivize higher performance and redirect low-performing students toward more suitable career paths. Exploiting the national rollout of performance standards across Dutch bachelor programs, I provide the first comprehensive evidence on their effectiveness. Although the performance standards create strong incentives to increase effort and redirect many low-performing students toward alternative programs, they slightly reduce long-run degree attainment, do not shorten time in education, and have no measurable earnings effect. The results cast doubt on the effectiveness of performance-based dismissal policies.