High school students from non-elite backgrounds are less likely to have peers with elite-educated parents than their elite counterparts. This difference in social capital is a key driver of the high intergenerational persistence in elite education. We identify a positive elite peer effect on enrollment in elite programs and labor market earnings, then disentangle underlying mechanisms. Exploiting a lottery in assessment, a causal mediation analysis shows the overall positive peer effect reflects a positive effect on application behavior (conditional on GPA). When considering income mobility, we find that further mixing between high school elite and non-elite students could improve mobility.

We extend the standard intergenerational mobility literature by examining the relationship between adult outcomes of children and the timing of parental income during their childhood years, using data from Norway. We find first that, conditional on permanent household income, the child’s human capital is higher in households where income is balanced between the early childhood and late childhood years than in households with a more imbalanced income profile. Second, compared to that in the early and late periods of childhood, income in the middle period has relatively low productivity.