The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter
Summary
The authors link anonymized federal tax records to census data to estimate children's adult outcomes by the neighborhood in which they grew up, at the Census-tract level for the entire United States. They build the Opportunity Atlas, showing that mobility varies enormously even between adjacent tracts and that childhood environment causally shapes later outcomes. The data reveal which specific neighborhoods foster upward mobility and identify correlates such as poverty rates, family structure, and racial composition.
Key findings
- Constructs tract-level estimates of children's adult earnings, incarceration, and other outcomes by parental income, covering the whole US.
- Upward mobility differs sharply across neighborhoods, often between tracts only a short distance apart.
- Childhood neighborhood exposure has causal effects, and mobility correlates with local poverty, family structure, and other tract characteristics.
Subjects & keywords
Cite this paper
Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, & Sonya R. Porter (2018). The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility. NBER Working Paper Series. https://doi.org/10.3386/w25147
@misc{chetty2018opportunity,
author = {Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman and Nathaniel Hendren and Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter},
title = {The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility},
journal = {NBER Working Paper Series},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.3386/w25147},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3386/w25147}
}