Sources of Regional Variation in Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from the Netherlands

In this paper, I investigate the impact of regions where people grow up on the transmission of socioeconomic status from parents to children, using rich Dutch administrative data. I disentangle place effects from other confounding factors by exploiting variation across children’s ages at the time their parents move across regions (Chetty and Hendren, 2018a). I document a place effect for educational attainment at the time that children choose a high school track (i.e., age 14): every additional year spent in a place with a one percentage point higher probability of enrollment into a high secondary education track, increases children’s own probability of following such a track by 5 percentage points. I identify selective location choices of parents that depend on their children’s ages at the time of move in terms of children’s high school tracks observed before moving. After controlling for such age-dependent migration and family fixed effects, I document no place effect for outcomes measured between age 24 and 28.45