How, When, and Where Does the Opportunity Gap Open Up in the Netherlands?

Abstract

We use administrative data on a wide range of outcomes, measured between birth and the age of 35, of 4.6 million children and their parents, to document three sets of results on intergenerational mobility in the Netherlands. First, we show that the opportunity gap in the Netherlands opens up at a very young age and that many of our 55 measures of health and wellbeing, education, work and income, and housing are strongly associated with parent income, wealth, and educational attainment. These differences persist from birth through adulthood. At the top (90th percentile) of the parent income distribution, children are on average 42% less likely to be small for gestational age at birth, 396% more likely to obtain a high primary school test score, 351% more likely to attend university, 75% less likely to experience young parenthood and 65% less likely to claim disability benefits at the age of 35, and compared with children at the bottom (10th percentile) of the parent income distribution. On average, a 10 percentage point increase in parent income is associated with a 2.8 percentage point increase in a child’s income. This means that the Netherlands has the third lowest relative intergenerational income mobility of all OECD countries for which this was measured, after the U.S. and the UK. Second, we document substantial spatial variation in the degree of absolute income mobility, measured as the mean income rank of 35-year-old children of parents at the 25th percentile of the parental income distribution. The distribution of absolute mobility across neighborhoods in the Netherlands is narrower than in the U.S. Third, we correlate our estimates of absolute upward mobility with various municipal-level characteristics and find higher rates of upward mobility in rural areas than in urban areas, lower rates of upward mobility in areas with a high share of voters on the left of the political spectrum, and lower rates of upward mobility in areas characterized by greater neighborhood and classroom segregation. We make our results publicly available as data sets and through two interactive websites, opportunitymap.nl and opportunitygap.nl. Joint paper with Helen Lam, Coen van de Kraats, and Erik-Jan van Kesteren.