The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R Porter. The American Economic Review, 2018

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We construct a public atlas of mean outcomes in adulthood by childhood census tract. Outcomes vary sharply across neighborhoods: For children whose parents earn $27,000, the standard deviation of mean household income in adulthood is $10,420 across tracts within counties. Only half the variation in outcomes is explained by traditional measures of neighborhood opportunity like poverty rates. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates indicate 60 percent of the variation in outcomes across neighborhoods is driven by causal effects. We demonstrate how our statistics can be applied to better target policies to improve low-opportunity areas and help families move to affordable high-opportunity areas. (JEL G51, I32, I38, J12, R23)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0d648928d6c7f6ee55c754538673b3c30751612

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Citations in the corpus

Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice (2019, methodology): “…tracts to which families in the treatment group moved are not merely classified as “high opportunity” due to noise and do in fact have higher latent levels of upward mobility, as one would expect given that the reliability of the Opportunity Atlas tract-level estimates is 0.91 (Chetty et al. 2018).”