Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility: Education doesn't Matter?

This study constructs a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in
adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data
covering nearly the entire U.S. population.  For each tract, we
estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates,
and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and
gender.  These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes
such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in
which children grew up. 

The authors find that children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby areas: for 
children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, 
the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $5,000 
across tracts within counties. They illustrate how these tract-level data 
can provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of 
human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. 

First, the estimates permit precise targeting of policies to improve 
economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain 
subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods 
matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as 
poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts 
that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's 
outcomes. The historical estimates are informative predictors of 
outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood 
conditions are relatively stable over time. 

Second, they show that the 
observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal 
effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity 
experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' 
outcomes. 

They then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are 
affordable to low- income families, providing an input into the design 
of affordable housing policies. The measures of children's long-term 
outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local 
economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the 
conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the 
same as those that lead to productive labor markets.