Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility

(with Raj Chetty, Will Dobbie, Sonya Porter, Crystal Yang)

Revise and Resubmit at Quarterly Journal of Economics

Non-technical Summary | Slides | Data | Opportunity Atlas | Brookings Webinar

NYT | The Economist | WSJ 1 | WSJ 2 | The Atlantic | NPR | Axios | Slow Boring | The Morning (NYT) | Harvard Gazette

Abstract

We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white children in the U.S. born between 1978 and 1992, earnings increased for children from high-income families but decreased for children from low-income families, increasing earnings gaps by parental income ("class") by 30%. Earnings increased for Black children at all parental income levels, reducing white-Black earnings gaps for children from low-income families by 30%. Class gaps grew and race gaps shrank similarly for non-monetary outcomes such as educational attainment, standardized test scores, and mortality rates. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the divergent trends in economic mobility were caused by differential changes in childhood environments, as proxied by parental employment rates, within local communities defined by race, class, and childhood county. Outcomes improve across birth cohorts for children who grow up in communities with increasing parental employment rates, with larger effects for children who move to such communities at younger ages. Children's outcomes are most strongly related to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with, such as those in their own birth cohort, suggesting that the relationship between children's outcomes and parental employment rates is mediated by social interaction. Our findings imply that community-level changes in one generation can propagate to the next generation and thereby generate rapid changes in economic mobility.

Growing Class Gaps, Shrinking Race Gaps

Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates

(with Clara Chambers and Joseph Winkelmann)

Non-technical Summary (AIBM) | NBER (Spring 2025)

The Atlantic 1 | The Atlantic 2 | WSJ | Axios | American Variety Radio (NPR) | Slate Money Podcast (48:00) | Family Stuff | Noahpinion | Marginal Revolution | Prof G | Cornell Chronicle

Abstract

Over the past half-century, U.S. four-year colleges have shifted from majority-male to majority-female. As college men have become increasingly scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by marrying economically well-off non-college men. Meanwhile, economic outcomes for other non-college men have sharply declined, accompanied by a drop in marriage rates for non-college women. Both historical evidence and cross-area comparisons suggest that worsening male outcomes primarily undermine the marriage prospects of non-college women. The gap in marriage rates between college- and non-college women is more than 50% smaller in areas where men have the lowest rates of joblessness and incarceration.

Marriage vs. Employment of Non-College Men by Commuting Zone

Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class

(with Jamie Gracie and Sonya Porter)

Non-technical Summary | County Level Marriage Patterns | Marginal Revolution

Abstract

Americans rarely marry outside their race or class group, a pattern with well-documented implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. Limited exposure—or interactions with members of other groups—may partly explain these low intergroup marriage rates. We instrument for exposure using variation in childhood neighborhoods based on whether other race and class groups had more opposite-sex children of similar age. Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage market model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one third of marital sorting by class but less than 5% by race.

Every Day Counts: Absenteeism and the Returns to Education in High-Poverty Schools

(with Jamie Gracie)

Abstract

Why do students in high-poverty schools perform worse academically and in the labor market than their peers in low-poverty schools? We show that a key difference is how regularly students attend school. We use transitory shocks to absences arising from factors like respiratory illnesses to estimate the effect of improving school-wide attendance. Among high-poverty schools, moving from the 75th to the 25th percentile of the absence distribution would raise high school graduation rates by 2.3 percentage points and increase average earnings at age 25 by $3,600. Our findings suggest that up to one-third of the achievement gap between low- and high-poverty schools can be attributed to absenteeism. We show that policies aimed at improving attendance in high-poverty schools can close these disparities in outcomes. We estimate that nationwide adoption of "Communities in Schools", the country's largest student support program, could reduce the achievement gap by 20%, primarily through its effect on attendance.

Can Individualized Student Supports Improve Economic Outcomes for Children in High Poverty Schools?

(with Jamie Gracie and Sonya Porter)

Abstract

How can we improve outcomes for low-income students? We analyze the adult earnings impacts of the largest comprehensive student support program in the United States. Communities in Schools (CIS) places a “navigator” in high-poverty schools who provides an integrated system of supports to students, including academic (e.g., tutoring), economic (e.g., access to food assistance, housing), and mentoring. In 2023, CIS worked with 1.8 million students in 3,750 schools. Using later-treated CIS schools as a control, we estimate that four years of exposure to CIS generates a $1,500 (6% of control mean) increase in earnings at age 30. Effects are larger for students from low-income families and are driven by a reduction in non-employment and an increase in the probability of having a low-paying job. Each child exposed to four years of CIS is expected to pay an additional $9,000 in taxes between ages 18-65, which compares favorably to the direct cost of the program. Our results are relevant for the growing community school movement and illuminate a possible path for improving economic mobility in low opportunity neighborhoods.

Impact of CIS on Earnings in Adulthood

What Explains Temporal and Geographic Variation in the Early US Coronavirus Pandemic?

(with Hunt Allcott, Levi Boxell, Jacob Conway, Billy Ferguson, Matthew Gentzkow)

Review of Economic Design (2024)

Vox | Forbes

Within-Industry Agglomeration of Occupations: Evidence from Census Microdata

(with Thomas Klier and Thomas Walstrum)

Journal of Regional Science (2019)