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

Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren (), Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014, vol. 129, issue 4, 1553-1623

Abstract: 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 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. JEL Codes: H0, J0, R0.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1187)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qju022 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States (2014)
Working Paper: Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States (2014)
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:oup:qjecon:v:129:y:2014:i:4:p:1553-1623

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().