Social Mobility
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Gary Solon -
Raj Chetty -
Florencia Torche
Leaders: Raj Chetty, Gary Solon, Florencia Torche
The purpose of the Social Mobility RG is to develop and exploit new administrative sources for measuring mobility and the effects of policy on mobility out of poverty. This research group is doing so by (a) providing comprehensive analyses of intergenerational mobility based on linked administrative data from U.S. tax returns, W-2s, and other sources, and (b) developing a new infrastructure for monitoring social mobility, dubbed the American Opportunity Study, that is based on linking census and other administrative data. Here’s a sampling of projects:
Small place estimates: The Equal Opportunity Project, led by Raj Chetty, uses tax return data to monitor opportunities for mobility out of poverty. In one of the new lines of analysis coming out of this project, the first round of results at the level of “commuting zones” are being redone at a more detailed level (e.g., census block level), thus allowing for even better inferences about the effects of place.
The American Opportunity Study: This research group is also collaborating with the Census Bureau to develop a new infrastructure for monitoring mobility that treats linked decennial census data as the spine on which other administrative data are hung.
Colleges and rising income inequality: Where do poor children go to attend college? The “Mobility Report Card” will convey the joint distribution of parent and student incomes for every Title IV institution in the United States.
The “absolute mobility” of the poor: What fraction of poor children grow up to earn more than their parents? Have rates of absolute upward mobility changed over time? This project develops a new method of estimating rates of absolute mobility for the 1940-1984 birth cohorts.
Intergenerational elasticities in the U.S.: There remains some debate about the size of intergenerational elasticities in the U.S. A rarely-used sample of 1987 tax data provides new evidence on U.S. elasticities.
Featured Examples
Mobility - CPI Research
| Title | Author | Media | |
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| Coming of Age in the Other America | Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, Kathryn Edin |
Coming of Age in the Other AmericaAuthor: Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, Kathryn EdinPublisher: Russell Sage Foundation Date: 04/2016 Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality. Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage. |
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| Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood | Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, Benjamin Scuderi |
Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in AdulthoodAuthor: Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, Benjamin ScuderiPublisher: NBER Date: 02/2016 We show that differences in childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood by documenting three facts using population tax records for children born in the 1980s. First, gender gaps in employment rates, earnings, and college attendance vary substantially across the parental income distribution. Notably, the traditional gender gap in employment rates is reversed for children growing up in poor families: boys in families in the bottom quintile of the income distributionare less likely to work than girls. Second, these gender gaps vary substantially across counties and commuting zones in which children grow up. The degree of variation in outcomes across places is largest for boys growing up in poor, single-parent families. Third, the spatial variation in gender gaps is highly correlated with proxies for neighborhood disadvantage. Low-income boys who grow up in high-poverty, high-minority areas work significantly less than girls. These areas also have higher rates of crime, suggesting that boys growing up in concentrated poverty substitute from formal employment to crime. Together, these findings demonstrate that gender gaps in adulthood have roots in childhood, perhaps because childhood disadvantage is especially harmful for boys. |
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| State of the Union 2016: Economic Mobility | Miles Corak |
State of the Union 2016: Economic MobilityAuthor: Miles CorakPublisher: Date: 02/2016 When compared to 24 middle-income and high-income countries, the U.S. ranks 16th in the amount of intergenerational earnings mobility. The relatively low level of mobility in the U.S. may arise in part because low-income children in the U.S. tend to have less stable and lower-income families, less secure families, and parents who have less time to devote to their children. |
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| The E ffects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment | Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Lawrence F. Katz |
The E ffects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity ExperimentAuthor: Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Lawrence F. KatzPublisher: Date: 08/2015 The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing projects housing vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children's long-term outcomes using administrative data from tax returns. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood signicantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were young (below age 13) when their families moved. These children also live in better neighborhoods themselves as adults and are less likely to become single parents. The treatment effects are substantial: children whose families take up an experimental voucher to move to a lower-poverty area when they are less than 13 years old have an annual income that is $3,477 (31%) higher on average relative to a mean of $11,270 in the control group in their mid-twenties. In contrast, the same moves have, if anything, negative long-term impacts on children who are more than 13 years old when their families move, perhaps because of the disruption effects of moving to a very dierent environment. The gains from moving fall with the age when children move, consistent with recent evidence that the duration of exposure to a better environment during childhood is a key determinant of an individual's long-term outcomes. The findings imply that offering vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods to families with young children who are living in high-poverty housing projects may reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty and ultimately generate positive returns for taxpayers. |
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| Economic Mobility in the United States | Pablo A. Mitnik |
Economic Mobility in the United StatesAuthor: Pablo A. MitnikPublisher: The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Russell Sage Foundation Date: 07/2015 Given the substantial body of research on economic mobility, one might imagine that little remains unknown. This is not the case. Although it is well established that a person’s income is related to that of his or her 1. Approximately half of parental income advantages are passed on to children. The intergenerational elasticity (IGE), when averaged across all levels of parental income, is estimated at 0.52 for men and 0.47 for women. These estimates are at the high end of previous estimates and imply that the United States is very immobile. 2. The persistence of advantage is especially large among those raised in the middle to upper reaches of the income distribution. The IGE among adults whose parents were between the 50th and 90th income percentiles is 0.68 for men and 0.63 for women. This means that approximately two-thirds of parental income differences within this region of the income distribution persist into the next generation. 3. Children born far apart in the income distribution have very different economic outcomes. The expected family income of children raised in families at the 90th income percentile is about three times that of children raised at the 10th percentile. 4. Parental income matters more for men’s earnings than for women’s. The average earnings IGE for men (0.56) is more than 40 percent higher than that for women (0.32). Although both men and women benefit from being born into higher-income families, men benefit much more—at least when it comes to their own earnings. 5. Parental income matters more for women’s chances of marriage, and of marrying better-off partners. The income IGE is large for men (0.52) mainly because children from higher-income families tend to have higher earnings as adults. For women, the income IGE is nearly as large (0.47), mainly because those from higher income origins are more likely to be married in their late 30s—and to marry higher-earnings partners. These results show that children born into lower-income families can expect very different futures relative to those from higher-income families. Given the country’s commitment to equality of opportunity, the findings may suggest the need for policies that increase economic mobility. Because a wide range of institutions affect mobility, including the family, schools, labor markets, and the tax system, many entry points are possible for developing such policies. Although the findings of this report can inform public policy, they do not lead to particular policy prescriptions or indicate which of these many possible intervention points should be given priority. |
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mobility - CPI Affiliates
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Nan Dirk De Graaf |
Professor and Official Fellow, Department of Sociology, Nuffield College |
University of Oxford |
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Dalton Conley |
Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology; Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research |
Princeton University |
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Nan Lin |
Oscar L. Tang Family Professor of Sociology, Academician, Academia Sinica (Taiwan) |
Duke University |
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Dennis Gilbert |
Professor of Sociology Emeritus; Lecturer in Sociology |
Hamilton College |
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Petr Mateju |
Professor |
Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic |
Pages
Mobility - Other Research
| Title | Author | Media | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Mobility in Europe | Richard Breen |
Social Mobility in EuropeAuthor: Richard BreenPublisher: Oxford University Press Date: 01/2005 Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. It uses data from 11 European countries covering the last 30 years of the twentieth century to analyze differences between countries and changes through time. The findings call into question several long-standing views about social mobility. We find a growing similarity between countries in their class structures and rates of absolute mobility: in other words, the countries of Europe are now more alike in their flows between class origins and destinationsthan they were thirty years ago. However, differences between countries in social fluidity (that is, the relative chances, between people of different class origins, of being found in given class destinations) show no reduction and so there is no evidence supporting theories of modernization whichpredict such convergence. Our results also contradict the long-standing Featherman Jones Hauser hypothesis of a basic similarity in social fluidity in all industrial societies 'with a market economy and a nuclear family system'. There are considerable differences between countries like Israel andSweden, where societal openness is very marked, and Italy, France, and Germany, where social fluidity rates are low. Similarly, there is a substantial difference between, for example, the Netherlands in the 1970s (which was quite closed) and in the 1990s, when it ranks among the most open societies. Mobility tables reflect many underlying processes and this makes it difficult to explain mobility and fluidity or to provide policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, those countries in which fluidity increased over the last decadesof the twentieth century had not only succeeded in reducing classinequalities in educational attainment but had also restricted the degree to which, among people with the same level of education, class background affected their chances of gaining access to better class destinations. |
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| Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment | Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan and Paul Hirschfield |
Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility ExperimentAuthor: Jens Ludwig, Greg J. Duncan and Paul HirschfieldPublisher: Quarterly Journal of Economics Date: 05/2001 |
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| Skill-Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality: Evidence from a Plant Retooling | Roberto M. Fernandez |
Skill-Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality: Evidence from a Plant RetoolingAuthor: Roberto M. FernandezPublisher: American Journal of Sociology Date: 02/2001 |
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| The Transition to Home Ownership and the Black-White Wealth Gap | Charles, Kerwin Kofi, Erik Hurst |
The Transition to Home Ownership and the Black-White Wealth GapAuthor: Charles, Kerwin Kofi, Erik HurstPublisher: Date: 03/2000 |
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| Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades | Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst |
Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five DecadesAuthor: Mark Aguiar and Erik HurstPublisher: Date: |
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