Studies on intergenerational social mobility usually examine the extent to which social positions of one generation determine the social positions of the next. This study investigates whether the persistence of inequality can be expected to stretch over more than two generations. Using a multigenerational version of GENLIAS, a large-scale database containing information from digitized Dutch marriage certificates during 1812–1922, this study describes and explains the influence of grandfathers and great-grandfathers on the occupational status attainment of 119,662 men in the Netherlands during industrialization. Multilevel regression models show that both grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s status influence the status attainment of men, after fathers and uncles are taken into account. Whereas the influence of the father and uncles decreases over time, that of the grandfather and great-grandfather remains stable. The results further suggest that grandfathers influence their grandsons through contact but also without being in contact with them. Although the gain in terms of explained variance from using a multigenerational model is moderate, leaving out the influence of the extended family considerably misrepresents the influence of the family on status attainment.

The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to industrialization and other modernization processes. Here, we test whether this is indeed the case. We study approximately 360,000 brothers from 189,000 families covering more than 500 municipalities in the Netherlands and a 70-year period (1827 to 1897). We complement these sibling-and family-level data with municipal indicators for the degree of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, educational expansion, geographic mobility, and mass transportation. We analyze these data by applying sibling models, that is, multilevel regression models where brothers are nested in families, which in turn are nested in communities. We find that the total-unmeasured-family effect on sons' status attainment decreases slightly and is higher than that found for contemporary societies. The measured influence of the family, operationalized by father's occupational status, decreased gradually in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century. A substantial part of this decrease was due to some, but not all, of the modernization processes adduced by the modernization thesis.

There are concerns that ability tracking at a young age increases unequal opportunities for children of different socioeconomic background to develop their potential. To disentangle family influence and potential ability, we applied moderation models to twin data on secondary educational track level from the Netherlands Twin Register (N = 8847). Delaying tracking to a later age is associated with a lower shared environmental influence and a larger genetic influence on track level in adolescence. This is in line with the idea that delaying tracking improves equality of opportunity. Our results further suggest that this is mostly because delaying tracking reduces the indirect influence of family background on track level via the test performance of students. Importantly, delaying tracking improves the realization of genetic potential especially among students with low test scores, while it lowers shared environmental influence on track level for students of all test performance levels.

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While previous research has conclusively established that children with higher cognitive ability and those originating from advantaged socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds have better educational outcomes, the interplay between the influences of cognitive ability and social origin has been largely overlooked. The influence of cognitive ability might be weaker in high-SES families as a result of resource compensation, and stronger in high-SES families owing to resource multiplication. We investigate these mechanisms while taking into account the possibility that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment might be partly spurious due to unobserved genetic and environmental influences. We do so by analysing a large sample of twins from the German TwinLife study (Npairs = 2,190). Our results show that the association between cognitive ability and educational attainment is to a large extent confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors. If this is not considered, and this is the case in most previous studies, high-SES parents seem to compensate for the lower cognitive ability of their children. However, when we consider the genetic and shared environmental confounding, the resource compensation effect becomes non-significant.