What Runs in the Family? Extended Kinship, Genetic Data, and Intergenerational Persistence

Recent research on multigenerational mobility has shown that socioeconomic persistence is stronger than what simple parent-child correlations suggest. It is not yet clear what channels explain this higher persistence. Collado et al. (2023) propose to exploit family-kinship correlations to decompose the intergenerational persistence of advantages into a direct channel, a latent cultural channel, and a latent genetic channel. In this thesis, I re-analyse and extend the estimation of their model using Dutch administrative and genetic data. Using their own data, I first show that, using only education data, the model admits economically distinct results that still match the extended family correlations. Then I replicate the analysis in the Netherlands, combining administrative and genetic data. Using Polygenic Scores to measure the genetic pathway, I show that the original benchmark cannot fit the genetic moments and that, once those moments enter the calibration, the results change substantially: the direct transmission channel becomes negligible and persistence is reallocated towards latent genetic and cultural components.