Many Americans embrace the ideal of "equality of opportunity", believing in the ideal that ones' economic opportunities should not depend on the parents to whom they happen to be born. While numerous researchers have been interested in the drivers of intergenerational mobility and economic opportunity, previous studies have often been hindered by a lack of available large datasets linking parents and their children. As a result, there is much currently unknown about equality of opportunity in the US: To what extent does the US offer equality of opportunity today? How does this vary geographically? What pathways do people use to move up the income ladder? And what types of policies can increase the use of these pathways and further increase income mobility?
This project will seek to answer these questions by conducting a comprehensive analysis of intergenerational income mobility by linking parents to children in a comprehensive dataset comprising the vast majority of US workers and their families.
The PIs will approach these questions in three stages. First, they will provide a descriptive analysis of intergenerational mobility in the United States. This includes calculating rates of mobility by fine geographic areas and studying the factors correlated with mobility, such as attending public higher educational institutions, starting a business, or strong local labor markets. The aim of this descriptive work is to motivate not only the subsequent work, but also to make these statistics accessible to future researchers so that others can study their own hypothesis about drivers of intergenerational mobility.
Second, the PIs will study several potential pathways of mobility in detail with the aim of quantifying the causal impact of these factors on income mobility. These pathways will depend on the first stage of the research, but the researchers suspect, for example, that access to low-cost higher educational institutions may be one important channel for upward mobility. To this aim, they will evaluate whether the cost of higher education is a barrier to mobility for disadvantaged children.
Finally, this project aims to explore which government policies (e.g. education tax credits, business incentives, etc.) are most effective in stimulating upward mobility. The broader goal of this study is to help policymakers design policies that promote equality of opportunity; hence, the PIs intend to contribute to an analysis of economic policy that focuses not only on the current generation, but identifies the impact of policies on the well-being of future generations.
