On the Determinants of Young Adult Outcomes: Impacts of Randomly Assigned Neighborhoods For Children in Military Families

Laura Kawano, Bruce Sacerdote, William Skimmyhorn and Michael Stevens

No 32674, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Using the quasi-random assignment of 760,000 children in U.S. military families, we show that neighborhood attributes experienced during childhood have powerful impacts on SAT scores, college-going and earnings. For earnings and college going outcomes, location during high school is twice as important as location during elementary school, and for SAT scores, location during middle school has the strongest impact. There is little evidence of positive interactions in neighborhood quality across ages groups. Importantly, the same locations benefi t children with equal potency across race or sex. Twenty years of exposure in a 1 standard deviation "better" county raises SAT composite scores by 10 points (1.8 percentiles), raises college attendance by 1.7 percentage points, earnings by 2.2 percentile points, and lowers EITC receipt by 10%. Impacts are three times more potent when we measure neighborhood quality at the zip code level: twenty years of exposure to a one (county level) standard deviation better zip code raises college going by 6.7 percentage points, SAT composite by 38 points and income percentile at age 25 by 6.1 points. By equalizing average neighborhood quality for Black and White families, we estimate that the Army's quasi-random assignment reduces Black-white earnings gaps among the children of Army personnel by 23%.

JEL-codes: I0 I24 J0 J01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32674.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32674

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32674
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().