What Explains Neighborhood Sorting by Income and Race?

Aliprantis, Dionissi; Carroll, Daniel R.; Young, Eric

doi:10.26509/frbc-wp-201808r

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…For example, recent studies have used the Opportunity Atlas data to analyze the effects of lead exposure, pollution, and neighborhood redlining on children's long-term outcomes (Manduca and Sampson 2019, Colmer et al 2019, Park and Quercia 2020. Other studies use the Atlas statistics as inputs into models of residential sorting (Aliprantis et al 2019, Davis et al 2019 and to understand perceptions of inequality (Ludwig and Kraus 2019). The ongoing American Voices Project is interviewing families in neighborhoods with particularly low or high levels of upward mobility to uncover new mechanisms from a qualitative lens.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

Chetty¹,

Friedman²,

Hendren³

et al. 2018

300

315

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We construct 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. We 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. We 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. Our historical estimates are informative predictors of outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood conditions are relatively stable over time. Second, we 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. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to lowincome families, providing an input into the design of affordable housing policies. Our 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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

Chetty¹,

Friedman²,

Hendren³

et al. 2018

300

315

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show abstract

“…Even more broadly, social scientists since Wilson (1997) have focused on the role of factors such as deindustrialization, neighborhoods, and schools in the persistence of the racial income gap. Recent fi ndings that the intergenerational transmission of income is lower for blacks than for their white counterparts at all levels of income (Chetty et al, 2018), and that the same is true for neighborhood quality regardless of wealth (Aliprantis et al, 2018b), suggest that policies successfully addressing the racial labor income and wealth gaps will have to address a broad set of issues.…”

Section: Policy Implications and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Behind the Persistence of the Racial Wealth Gap?

Aliprantis

Carroll

2019

EC (FRB Cleveland)

Self Cite

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Most studies of the persistent gap in wealth between whites and blacks have investigated the large gap in income earned by the two groups. Those studies generally concluded that the wealth gap was “too big” to be explained by differences in income. We study the issue using a different approach, capturing the dynamics of wealth accumulation over time. We find that the income gap is the primary driver behind the wealth gap and that it is large enough to explain the persistent difference in wealth accumulation. The key policy implication of our work is that policies designed to speed the closing of the racial wealth gap would do well to focus on closing the racial income gap.

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“…As a result, racial and ethnic minority people face more obstacles in their daily lives and to climb the social ladder. As they pay more taxes for the same upward social mobility, they gain less health from it [49,50,51,52]. Psychological processes also play a role in causing diminished returns for racial and ethnic people.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Education Attainment and Obesity：Differential Returns Based on Sexual Orientation

Assari

2019

Behavioral Sciences

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Background: Although high educational attainment is linked to better health and lower health risk behaviors, this effect may be systemically smaller for racial and ethnic minority groups compared to Whites. However, it is still unknown whether these diminished returns also apply to marginalization based on sexual orientation. Aims: In a national sample of adults which was composed of people of color, we compared straight and homosexual people for the association between education attainment and obesity. Methods: The Social Justice Sexuality Project (SJS-2010) is a cross-sectional national survey of health and wellbeing of predominantly people of color who identify as homosexual. The current analysis included 2884 adults (age 24 or more) who were either heterosexual (n = 260) or homosexual (n = 2624). The predictor variable was education attainment, and the outcome variable was obesity status (body mass index larger than 30 kg/m2 [kilograms per meter squared]). Demographic factors (age and gender), household income, nativity (US born vs. immigrant), and health (self-rated health and current smoking) were the covariates. Sexual orientation was the moderator. Results: In the pooled sample, high education attainment was protective against obesity status. Sexual orientation interacted with education attainment on odds of obesity, which was suggestive of stronger protective effects of high education attainment against obesity for heterosexual than homosexual individuals. Conclusion: High education attainment better protects heterosexual than homosexual people against obesity, a pattern similar to what has been observed for comparison of Whites and non-Whites. Smaller protective effects of education attainment on health behaviors of marginalized people are possibly, due to prejudice and discrimination that they experience. Discrimination may minimize stigmatized individuals’ abilities to mobilize their economic and human resources and translate them to tangible outcomes. This finding extends the Minorities’ Diminished Returns theory, suggesting that it is not just race/ethnicity but possibly any marginalizing and stigmatizing social identity that results in diminished returns of socioeconomic status resources.

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What Explains Neighborhood Sorting by Income and Race?

Cited by 18 publications

References 59 publications

The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

What Is Behind the Persistence of the Racial Wealth Gap?

Education Attainment and Obesity：Differential Returns Based on Sexual Orientation

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