The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
We construct a public atlas of mean outcomes in adulthood by childhood Census tract. Outcomes vary sharply across neighborhoods: for children whose parents earn $27,000, the standard deviation of mean household income in adulthood is $10,420 across tracts within counties. Only half the variation in outcomes is explained by traditional measures of neighborhood opportunity like poverty rates. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates indicate that 60% of the variation in outcomes across neighborhoods is driven by causal effects. We demonstrate how our statistics can be applied to better target policies to improve low-opportunity areas and help families move to affordable high-opportunity areas.
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Copy CitationRaj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter, "The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility," NBER Working Paper 25147 (2018), https://doi.org/10.3386/w25147.Download Citation
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Non-Technical Summaries
- Growing up around adults who are employed is predictive of higher earnings when children reach adulthood, but availability of jobs in...
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