Lands of Opportunity: Differences in the Geography of Wealth and Income Mobility in the United States

We provide new county-level estimates of intergenerational mobility, covering multiple economic concepts: total income, labor income, homeownership, housing wealth, and total wealth. This is possible via small-area estimation techniques and linked survey and administrative data covering millions of US children born between 1978 and 1986. We find that relative mobility in wealth concepts shows less spatial clustering and more spatial variation than relative mobility in income concepts. Many cities and their suburbs exhibit lower relative mobility (i.e., higher intergenerational persistence) in wealth concepts than in income concepts. Next, we show that various local characteristics are associated with some concepts of economic mobility but not with others. For example, we estimate a strong negative association between the local severity of the Great Recession and child income, regardless of parent position in the income distribution. However, the negative association between recession severity and wealth only exists among children from poorer families. We provide a public-use data package on census.gov to facilitate further research.