Shaping the Next Generation: How Family and Policy Influence Human Capital Formation

This thesis studies how human capital is formed and transmitted across generations. Using rich administrative data from the Netherlands, it combines causal inference with machine learning techniques to analyze economic inequality and mobility at population scale. The first chapter examines how strongly economic outcomes depend on family background. It shows that income gaps across families are larger than commonly measured and explores the role of neighborhoods and pre-birth factors in shaping these gaps. The second chapter studies how childhood advantages in one generation persist into the next. Focusing on birth order, it shows that early life experiences can generate economic differences that extend beyond the first generation and examines the channels through which these advantages are transmitted. The third chapter turns to education policy and evaluates the effectiveness of performance-based dismissal policies in Dutch higher education. It shows that such policies do not achieve their goal of improving long-run education or labor market outcomes, raising doubts about their effectiveness as a tool for promoting skill investment.