Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective

Abstract

We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. 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, fewer 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.

The early biopsychosocial development of boys and the origins of violence in males

“…Some circumstantial evidence for this proposition of differential effects comes from recent economic analyses, which call public policy attention to the disadvantages to boys. Notable among these studies is Bertrand and Pan (), who examined “parental inputs” such as the amount and quality of attention provided to boys before they start kindergarten and related these to problems of school expulsion in Grade 8; Chetty, Hendren, Lin, Majerovitz, and Scuderi (), who found that males growing up in poor, single‐parent families were less likely to be legally employed in their 20s than were females raised under similar circumstances; Chetty, Hendren, Jones, and Porter (), who found that among African American children, males persistently show lower levels of economic mobility, as compared to Whites and to African American females, and that these differences in economic mobility are more likely to diminish in communities with “low poverty rates, low levels of racial bias … and high rates of father presence” (p. 42); and Autor, Figlio, Karbownik, Roth, and Wasserman (), who found that “boys born to low education and unmarried mothers have a higher incidence of truancy and behavioral problems throughout elementary and middle school” (p. 1).…”

Measuring socioeconomic adversity in early life

“…Children below five years age are vulnerable to the lifelong effects of early adversity and least able to fend for themselves . Indeed, socioeconomic adversity contributes to under‐five mortality and leads to intergenerational transfers of inequality . We used the CANDLE study ( C onditions A ffecting N eurocognitive D evelopment and L earning in E arly childhood) to identify factors associated with socioeconomic adversity in pregnant mothers and their children.…”

Financial Shocks, Liquid Assets, and Material Hardship in Low- and Moderate-Income Households: Differences by Race

“…Income (Chetty et al 2018;Semega et al 2017) and wealth (Keister 2000;Lui 2006;Oliver and Shapiro 2006;) gaps between black and Latino and white households have been well studied and documented. Yet, racial and ethnic disparities also exist concerning other indicators of household financial stability.…”