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To improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the strong association between family background and children's educational attainment, we examined intergenerational transmission within families where genetic transmission is absent. Specifically, we investigated the effect of parent's education and income on the educational attainment of their foreign-born adopted children. A large-scale register database was used, which contains information on the adoption status, educational level in secondary school and parental characteristics of all 15-year old children living in the Netherlands in the years 2011-2013. This study demonstrated that parental education mainly influenced their children's education when they were genetically related and that the influence was weak when they were adopted.Parental income, on the other hand, affected both adopted and biological children's educational attainment. Hence, the results suggested that genetic transmission and economic capital play a substantial role in intergenerational transmission of educational attainment.

Prior research has shown that later tracking is related to smaller inequalities by social origin. One of the underlying mechanisms indicates that allowing more schooling time in comprehensive classes is beneficial for, especially, low-SES students. In this study, we question whether this is the case for boys and girls and test whether later tracking diminishes social inequality in educational performance among boys and girls. Microdata on reading and mathematics competence during primary and secondary school, gathered from PIRLS, TIMSS, and PISA, are combined with contextual-level data on the tracking age. We employ differences-in-differences models to test whether the impact of tracking on SES gaps in test scores differs between boys and girls. We find that later tracking reduces inequalities by social origin in test scores for girls. Staying longer in untracked classes does not, however, affect SES-based inequalities for boys. This suggests that the general finding that later tracking reduces inequalities by social background is driven by girls.

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