Center for the Study of Economic Mobility (CSEM): Academic Journal Articles

Raj Chetty and his colleagues use a myriad of innovative data techniques to investigate intergenerational mobility. They demonstrate that absolute mobility has been steadily falling since the 1940s, suggesting the “American Dream” is harder to achieve than ever before.

This paper, written by Raj Chetty and his colleagues, presents evidence that neighborhoods determine outcomes like a child’s expected earnings in adulthood and the probability that he will be incarcerated later in life.

This paper, written by Raj Chetty and his colleagues, examines the intergenerational black-white income gap. This gap is slimmest when children grow up in areas with low poverty rates, low racial bias among whites, and high father presence among blacks.

In this paper, Raj Chetty and his colleagues explore how economic mobility varies across the cities and counties in the United States. They find that high mobility is correlated with strong social capital and low residential segregation, among other factors.

Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren examine the impact that neighborhoods have on intergenerational mobility, at the county level. Children in poor families have better outcomes when they grow up in counties with less income inequality, less concentrated poverty, higher quality schools, more two-parent families, and less crime.

In his ambitious paper, Miles Corak takes a macro and international level approach to studying intergenerational mobility. He finds that high levels of income inequality often precede low rates of intergenerational mobility. He compares and contrasts mobility in the US to other countries.

This paper outlines how being raised in a neighborhood in poverty has a huge impact on downward economic mobility for children’s economic future. Economic mobility thus has a geographic and spatial component that must be considered along with public policies aimed at individual opportunities.

Evelyn Blumenberg and Gregory Pierce evaluate the role that transportation played in the effectiveness of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) initiative. They find that access to an automobile promoted the likelihood of gaining employment, and improved access to public transportation promoted the maintaining of employment.

This paper finds evidence that the built environment, especially sprawling development, can significantly impact economic mobility. These researchers find that sprawl is negatively related to upward mobility.

In this paper, J.S. Sandoval and colleagues examine how transportation influences employment and other labor related variables. They find that car ownership significantly predicts the likelihood of employment and the exiting of government assistance programs.

In his paper, Justin Tyndall demonstrates that public transportation access has a causal impact on unemployment rates for those who are dependent on public transit.