  We study how childhood exposure to technology at ages 5-15 via the occupation
of the parents affects the ability to climb the social ladder in terms of
income at ages 45-49 using the Danish micro data from years 1961-2019. Our
measure of technology exposure covers the degree to which using computers
(hardware and software) is required to perform an occupation, and it is created
by merging occupational codes with detailed data from O*NET. The challenge in
estimating this effect is that long-term outcome is observed over a different
time horizon than our treatment of interest. We therefore adapt the surrogate
index methodology, linking the effect of our childhood treatment on
intermediate surrogates, such as income and education at ages 25-29, to the
effect on adulthood income. We estimate that a one standard error increase in
exposure to technology increases the income rank by 2\%-points, which is
economically and statistically significant and robust to cluster-correlation
within families. The derived policy recommendation is to update the educational
curriculum to expose children to computers to a higher degree, which may then
act as a social leveler.
