Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: an Intergenerational Perspective*

By Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R Porter. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018

519 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989 to 2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to persistent disparities across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven by differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women. Hispanic Americans have rates of intergenerational mobility more similar to whites than blacks, leading the Hispanic-white income gap to shrink across generations. Second, differences in parental marital status, education, and wealth explain little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income. Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. The few areas with small black-white gaps tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood have significantly better outcomes. However, less than 5% of black children grow up in such areas. Our findings suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require efforts whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.

Subfields: Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57578ca7c0a4a9dcffd622938b78b5e1285f2207

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Citations in the corpus

Racial categories in machine learning (2018, background): “[10] on racial effects of intergenerational class mobility confirm that black children have lower rates of up-”
Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality* (2020, background): “One of the most striking dimensions of inequality in the United States is the persistence of large racial economic disparities (Bayer and Charles, 2018; Chetty et al., 2018).”
Bias in the Air: A Nationwide Exploration of Teachers’ Implicit Racial Attitudes, Aggregate Bias, and Student Outcomes (2020, background): “Aggregate implicit bias also explains some of the geographic variation in racial differences in economic mobility (Chetty et al., 2018).”
The Challenges of Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs (2021, background): “Chetty et al. (2020) further noted that the geographic areas with the smallest Black–White outcome disparities were those with low poverty, low levels of racial bias, and high rates of father presence.”
Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the United States over Two Centuries (2021, methodology): “To study this cohort, we use aggregate administrative data made public by the Opportunity Insights project, which is based on links of parents and their nearly six million children ( Chetty et al. 2018a, b .”
Coarse race data conceals disparities in clinical risk score performance (2023, background): “…our findings also have implications for the many other settings where coarse categories have been used to study inequality and algorithmic bias (Chetty et al., 2020; Goel et al., 2016; Franchi et al., 2023; Rho et al., 2023; Kleinberg et al., 2018; Voigt et al., 2017; Kline et al., 2022;…”