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

June 2024

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class' are listed below in order of similarity.

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

  July 2024

  Authors: Raj Chetty, Sonya R. Porter, Benjamin Goldman, Will Dobbie, Crystal S. Yang

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-24-38

  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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Race and Mobility in U.S. Marriage Markets: Quantifying the Role of Segregation
  

  December 2022

  Authors: Jonathan Eggleston, Marta Murray-Close, Caroline Walker, Ariel J. Binder

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-22-59R

  We examine racial disparities in upward intergenerational mobility of family income by linking American Community Survey respondents born in 1978-87 to their parents' tax records. This linkage facilitates better measurement of marriage-market processes than tax records alone. Relative to White individuals, we document lower upward mobility of partner income for Black, Hispanic, and Asian individuals. These disparities offset Asian women and men's advantages in personal income mobility, overturn Black women's small advantage, and compound Black men's disadvantage. We develop a novel nonparametric decomposition which reveals that these disparities are driven primarily by racial differences in marriage-market opportunities, but also by different partnering rates conditional on opportunities. We then apply a selection-correction methodology to estimate causal effects of childhood exposure to racial segregation. Our design approximates a shift in the current generation's segregation exposure, holding historical exposures constant. This channel generates substantial Black-White intergenerational mobility gaps across all income measures, and we show that these effects cumulate over a multigenerational horizon.
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• Working Paper

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

  September 2018

  Authors: Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-18-40R

  We study the sources of racial and ethnic disparities in income using de-identified longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three sets of results. First, the intergenerational persistence of disparities varies substantially across racial groups. For example, Hispanic Americans are moving up significantly in the income distribution across generations because they have relatively high rates of intergenerational income mobility. In contrast, black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to large income disparities that persist across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women. Second, differences in family characteristics such as parental marital status, education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income. Differences in ability also do not explain the patterns of intergenerational mobility we document. 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. Both black and white boys have better outcomes in low-poverty areas, but black-white gaps are larger on average for boys who grow up in such neighborhoods. The few areas in which black-white gaps are relatively small 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 earn more and are less likely to be incarcerated. However, fewer than 5% of black children grow up in such environments. These 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.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
  

  September 2018

  Authors: Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, Sonya R. Porter, John N. Friedman

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-18-42R

  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 tracts: for children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $4,200 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, we show that 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 low-income 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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• Working Paper

  
  
  Where to Build Affordable Housing? Evaluating the Tradeoffs of Location
  

  December 2023

  Authors: Ariel J. Binder, Cody Cook, Pearl Z. Li

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-23-62R

  How does the location of affordable housing affect tenant welfare, the distribution of assistance, and broader societal objectives such as racial integration? Using administrative data on tenants of units funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), we first show that characteristics such as race and proxies for need vary widely across neighborhoods. Despite fixed eligibility requirements, LIHTC developments in more opportunity-rich neighborhoods house tenants who are higher income, more educated, and far less likely to be Black. To quantify the welfare implications, we build a residential choice model in which households choose from both market-rate and affordable housing options, where the latter must be rationed. While building affordable housing in higher-opportunity neighborhoods costs more, it also increases household welfare and reduces city-wide segregation. The gains in household welfare, however, accrue to more moderate-need, non-Black/Hispanic households at the expense of other households. This change in the distribution of assistance is primarily due to a 'crowding out' effect: households that only apply for assistance in higher-opportunity neighborhoods crowd out those willing to apply regardless of location. Finally, other policy levers'such as lowering the income limits used for means-testing'have only limited effects relative to the choice of location.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  From Marcy to Madison Square? The Effects of Growing Up in Public Housing on Early Adulthood Outcomes
  

  November 2024

  Authors: Amanda Eng, Raheem Chaudhry

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-24-67

  This paper studies the effects of growing up in public housing in New York City on children's long-run outcomes. Using linked administrative data, we exploit variation in the age children move into public housing to estimate the effects of spending an additional year of childhood in public housing on a range of economic and social outcomes in early adulthood. We find that childhood exposure to public housing improves labor market outcomes and reduces participation in federal safety net programs, particularly for children from the most disadvantaged families. Additionally, we find there is some heterogeneity in impacts across public housing developments. Developments located in neighborhoods with relatively fewer renters and higher household incomes are better for children overall. Our estimate of the marginal value of public funds suggests that for every $1 the government spends per child on public housing, children receive $1.40 in benefits, including $2.30 for children from the most disadvantaged families.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Childhood Housing and Adult Earnings: A Between-Siblings Analysis of Housing Vouchers and Public Housing
  

  January 2013

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  Working Paper Number:

  CES-13-48RR

  To date, research on the long-term effects of childhood participation in voucher-assisted and public housing has been limited by the lack of data and suitable identification strategies. We create a national level longitudinal data set that enables us to analyze how children's housing experiences affect adult earnings and incarceration rates. While naive estimates suggest there are substantial negative consequences to childhood participation in voucher assisted and public housing, this result appears to be driven largely by selection of households into housing assistance programs. To mitigate this source of bias, we employ household fixed-effects specifications that use only within-household (across-sibling) variation for identification. Compared to naive specifications, household fixed-effects estimates for earnings are universally more positive, and they suggest that there are positive and statistically significant benefits from childhood residence in assisted housing on young adult earnings for nearly all demographic groups. Childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of incarceration across all household race/ethnicity groups. Time spent in voucher-assisted or public housing is especially beneficial for females from non-Hispanic Black households, who experience substantial increases in expected earnings and lower incarceration rates.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Effect of Low-Income Housing on Neighborhood Mobility: Evidence from Linked Micro-Data
  

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  Authors: Quentin Brummet, Otávio Bartalotti

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  carra-2016-02

  While subsidized low-income housing construction provides affordable living conditions for poor households, many observers worry that building low-income housing in poor communities induces individuals to move to poor neighborhoods. We examine this issue using detailed, nationally representative microdata constructed from linked decennial censuses. Our analysis exploits exogenous variation in low-income housing supply induced by program eligibility rules for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits to estimate the effect of subsidized housing on neighborhood mobility patterns. The results indicate little evidence to suggest a causal effect of additional low-income housing construction on the characteristics of neighborhoods to which households move. This result is true for households across the income distribution, and supports the hypothesis that subsidized housing provides affordable living conditions without encouraging households to move to less-affluent neighborhoods than they would have otherwise.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Estimating the Impact of the Age of Criminal Majority: Decomposing Multiple Treatments in a Regression Discontinuity Framework
  

  January 2023

  Authors: Caroline Walker, Michael Mueller-Smith, Benjamin Pyle

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-23-01

  This paper studies the impact of adult prosecution on recidivism and employment trajectories for adolescent, first-time felony defendants. We use extensive linked Criminal Justice Administrative Record System and socio-economic data from Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit). Using the discrete age of majority rule and a regression discontinuity design, we find that adult prosecution reduces future criminal charges over 5 years by 0.48 felony cases (? 20%) while also worsening labor market outcomes: 0.76 fewer employers (? 19%) and $674 fewer earnings (? 21%) per year. We develop a novel econometric framework that combines standard regression discontinuity methods with predictive machine learning models to identify mechanism-specific treatment effects that underpin the overall impact of adult prosecution. We leverage these estimates to consider four policy counterfactuals: (1) raising the age of majority, (2) increasing adult dismissals to match the juvenile disposition rates, (3) eliminating adult incarceration, and (4) expanding juvenile record sealing opportunities to teenage adult defendants. All four scenarios generate positive returns for government budgets. When accounting for impacts to defendants as well as victim costs borne by society stemming from increases in recidivism, we find positive social returns for juvenile record sealing expansions and dismissing marginal adult charges; raising the age of majority breaks even. Eliminating prison for first-time adult felony defendants, however, increases net social costs. Policymakers may still find this attractive if they are willing to value beneficiaries (taxpayers and defendants) slightly higher (124%) than potential victims.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States
  

  October 2024

  Authors: Reed Walker, John Voorheis, Jonathan Colmer, Suvy Qin

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-24-57

  This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, wealth, and race by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979'2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic information from linked survey and administrative data. In the first year of our data, the relationship between income and ambient pollution levels nationally is approximately zero for both non-Hispanic White and Black individuals. However, at every single percentile of the national income distribution, Black individuals are exposed to, on average, higher levels of pollution than White individuals. By 2016, the relationship between income and air pollution had steepened, primarily for Black individuals, driven by changes in where rich and poor Black individuals live. We utilize quasi-random shocks to income to examine the causal effect of changes in income and wealth on pollution exposure over a five year horizon, finding that these income'pollution elasticities map closely to the values implied by our descriptive patterns. We calculate that Black-White differences in income can explain ~10 percent of the observed gap in air pollution levels in 2016.
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