Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. NBER Working Paper No. 19843, January 2014.
“We 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 U.S. 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 (1) less residential segregation, (2) less income inequality, (3) better primary schools, (4) greater social capital, and (5) greater family stability. While our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the new publicly available statistics on intergenerational mobility by area developed here can facilitate future research on such mechanisms.”
- See also Matthew O’Brien – Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South? “Upward mobility has stayed the same the past 50 years despite skyrocketing inequality. But it’s lower in the South (and Ohio) than anywhere else in the U.S.—or the rest of the developed world.”
