Geography Of Intergenerational Mobility Research Articles

Where is the Land of Hope and Glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales*

AbstractWe present a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata, focusing on occupation, homeownership, and education. Four main results emerge. First, area‐level differences in upward occupational mobility are highly persistent over time. Second, measures of absolute and relative mobility tend to be spatially positively correlated. Third, there is a robust relationship between upward educational and upward occupational mobility. Last, there is a small negative relationship between upward homeownership mobility and upward occupational mobility, revealing that social mobility comparisons based on different outcomes can have different trends.

A Different Land of Opportunity: The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Has the geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States changed over time? Constructing a large historical linked sample, I show that upward mobility in the early twentieth century was greater for those who grew up in the coastal and industrial regions, in contrast to more recent times, where mobility is higher among persons who were raised in the middle of the country. The historical patterns are not driven by imperfections in record linkage or measurement error in economic status.

The geography of intergenerational mobility: Evidence of educational persistence and the “Great Gatsby Curve” in Brazil

AbstractThis paper explores the variation in intergenerational educational mobility across the Brazilian states based on univariate econometric techniques. The analysis of the national household survey (PNAD‐2014) confirms a strong variation in mobility among the 27 federative units in Brazil and demonstrates a significant correlation between mobility and income inequality. In this sense, this work presents empirical evidence for the existence of the “Great Gatsby curve” within a single country: states with greater income disparities present higher levels of persistence in educational levels across generations. Finally, the paper investigates one specific mechanism behind this correlation: whether higher income inequality might lead to lower investment in human capital among children from socially vulnerable households. The paper delivers robust and compelling results showing that children born into families where the parents have not completed primary education have a statistically significant reduction in their chance of completing the educational system if they live in states with a higher level of income inequality.

The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean

In this paper, I estimate intergenerational mobility (IGM) in education using cross-sectional data from 91 censuses that span 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over half a century. I measure upward mobility as the likelihood of obtaining at least a primary education for individuals whose parents did not finish primary school, whereas downward mobility as the likelihood of failing to complete primary education for individuals whose parents completed at least primary school. In addition, I explore the geography of educational IGM using nearly 400 “provinces” (coarse administrative units similar to states in the U.S.) and more than 6,000 “districts” (fine administrative units similar to counties in the U.S.). I document wide cross-country and within-country heterogeneity. In LAC, the distance between the most and least upwardly mobile country is close to what has been recently documented in Africa, although the least mobile countries in Africa are less mobile than the least mobile in LAC. I document a declining trend in the mobility gap between urban and rural populations, but I do not find important differences by gender. Within countries, the level of mobility is highly correlated to the share of primary completion of the previous generation, which suggests a high level of inertia. In addition, upward (downward) mobility is negatively (positively) correlated to distance to the capital and the share of employment in agriculture, but positively (negatively) correlated to the share of employment in industry.

The geography of intergenerational mobility — Danish evidence

We provide within-country intergenerational income rank mobility estimates from Denmark. We find the highest intergenerational income mobility within middle-income rural municipalities and the lowest intergenerational income mobility within urban and poor rural municipalities. Relative mobility within Denmark is similar to relative mobility within Canada and larger than within the United States, while absolute rank mobility at the 25th and 75th parental income percentiles vary more in the United States than in Denmark. Within-country intergenerational mobility is positively correlated with the share of working-age employed and married inhabitants, and negatively with the share of single parents, teen births, non-western immigrants, and inhabitants outside the labor force.

Places of Persistence: Slavery and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States

Intergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultivating cotton as an instrument for the prevalence of slavery. As a first step to disentangle the underlying channels of persistence, I examine whether any of the five broad factors highlighted by Chetty et al. (2014a) as the most important correlates of upward mobility—family structure, income inequality, school quality, segregation, and social capital—can account for the link between earlier slavery and current mobility. More fragile family structures in areas where slavery was more prevalent, as reflected in lower marriage rates and a larger share of children living in single-parent households, is seemingly the most relevant to understand why it still shapes the geography of opportunity in the United States.

Racial and Ethnic Differences in the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility

We use the NLSY79 to produce the first estimates of intergenerational mobility in the U.S. by both region and race/ethnicity. We show that gaps in intergenerational mobility by race are significantly larger than those by region. In particular, there is no region in the United States where it is better to be poor and black compared to being equally poor and white. We also show that the expected rank of Hispanics falls between that of whites and blacks. We find that the low mobility in the Southeast of the US documented by Chetty et al (2014) is actually driven by low mobility by whites and that blacks who grew up in the Southeast actually experience higher mobility than blacks growing up in the Northeast and Midwest. We also directly examine the role of migration and find that it plays little role in explaining the regional heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility. Finally, we use a rich set of individual covariates available in the NLSY — including test scores — and show that these can explain much of the gaps by race/ethnicity.

Geography of intergenerational mobility and child development

Recent research by Chetty and colleagues finds that children's chances of upward mobility are affected by the communities in which they grow up [Chetty R, Hendren N (2016) Working paper 23002]. However, the developmental pathways through which communities of origin translate into future economic gain are not well understood. In this paper we examine the association between Chetty and Hendren's county-level measure of intergenerational mobility and children's cognitive and behavioral development. Focusing on children from low-income families, we find that growing up in a county with high upward mobility is associated with fewer externalizing behavioral problems by age 3 years and with substantial gains in cognitive test scores between ages 3 and 9 years. Growing up in a county with 1 SD better intergenerational mobility accounts for ∼20% of the gap in developmental outcomes between children from low- and high-income families. Collectively, our findings suggest that the developmental processes through which residential contexts promote upward mobility begin early in childhood and involve the enrichment of both cognitive and social-emotional development.

Human capital spill-overs and the geography of intergenerational mobility

We develop and estimate an equilibrium model of geographic variation in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE). The theory extends the Becker–Tomes model, introducing a production sector in which workers' human capital inputs are complements. In this setting the return to parental human capital investments is lower where skill complementarity is more intense, and this is reflected in less intergenerational persistence. We also show that education subsidies may be more desirable where skill complementarities are stronger, endogenously leading to a negative correlation between progressive public policy and IGE. Using microdata we construct location-specific measures of skill complementarity and document that patterns of geographic variation in IGE are consistent with this hypothesis. Geographic differences in skill complementarity directly account for roughly one fifth of cross-country variation in IGE, and possibly more if one allows for the indirect effect through government expenditure in public education.

Human Capital Spill-Overs and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility

We develop and estimate an equilibrium model of geographic variation in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE). The theory extends the Becker-Tomes model, introducing a production sector in which workers’ human capital inputs are complements. In this setting the return to parental human capital investments is lower where skill complementarity is more intense, and this is reflected in less intergenerational persistence. We also show that education subsidies may be more desirable where skill complementarities are stronger, endogenously leading to a negative correlation between progressive public policy and IGE. Using microdata we construct location-specific measures of skill complementarity and document that patterns of geographic variation in IGE are consistent with this hypothesis. Geographic differences in skill complementarity directly account for roughly one fifth of cross-country variation in IGE, and possibly more if one allows for the indirect effect through government expenditure in public education.

Bibliography

Bibliography

Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States *

AbstractWe use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 percentile increase in a child’s income. Second, intergenerational mobility varies substantially across areas within the United States. For example, the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9% in San Jose. Third, we explore the factors correlated with upward mobility. High mobility areas have (i) less residential segregation, (ii) less income inequality, (iii) better primary schools, (iv) greater social capital, and (v) greater family stability. Although our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms.