Intergenerational Mobility I: Geography
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 3, 2027 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EST)
- Chair: Corbin Miller, Internal Revenue Service
Ranking Places by Intergenerational Mobility and Revealed Preference
Abstract
Can places be ranked and recommended to families based on how they improve children’s outcomes in adulthood? Critics of related programs observe that rankings are based on estimates, and may be unreliable because of bias or noise in the estimates. In this paper, we use new administrative data and new computational methods to improve quasi-experimental estimates of the exposure effects of commuting zones (CZs) on children’s adult outcomes in the U.S., reducing noise by two orders of magnitude. We show that estimated exposure effects are unbiased, and measure bias in observed outcomes used in most rankings. We provide a more reliable ranking of CZs based on exposure effects, which could be used to inform families about where and when to move. However, an alternative ranking based on where parents actually move suggests that parents prefer places with negative exposure effects. These places have positive earnings premia, setting up a key tradeoff for programs encouraging family relocation.On the Determinants of Young Adult Outcomes: Impacts of Randomly Assigned Neighborhoods for Children in Military Families
Abstract
We use quasi-random assignments for 725,000 children in U.S. military families to show that childhood locations have large impacts on SAT scores, college-going and earnings, and tax credit utilization. Exposure to higher levels of adult education raises college attendance and exposure to higher median incomes increase a child's earnings at 26. Exposure effects are convex in the number of exposure years and age at exposure matters, but there are little complementarities in location effects across ages. Neighborhood effects are remarkably similar across race and sex. The Army's quasi-random assignment likely shrinks earnings gaps among young adults by equalizing the average neighborhoods for black and white children.Immigration Restrictions and Natives' Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from the 1920s US Quota Acts
Abstract
We study the effects of immigration restrictions on the intergenerational mobility of US-born men in the United States. We link US-born sons observed in 1900, 1920, and 1940 full-count Censuses to their fathers, and construct a measure of county-level exposure to the 1920s immigration acts, which sharply curtailed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Exploiting this policy-induced variation, we find that the quotas reduced intergenerational mobility among US-born white men, but had no adverse effect for Black men. Among whites, losses were smaller for sons of richer fathers, who were more likely to migrate away from highly exposed areas. Evidence from the 1940 Census indicates that exposed white men were less likely to be employed and earned lower wages in adulthood, consistent with both occupational downgrading and reduced productivity within occupations. We show that these effects operated through both reduced immigrant–native complementarities and incomplete substitution from unrestricted migration, while human capital investment can explain at most only a modest part of the total effect.JEL Classifications
- J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers
- R2 - Household Analysis