A school finance equalization program established in Mississippi in 1920 failed to help many of the state's Black students'an outcome that was typical in the segregated U.S. South (Horace Mann Bond, 1934). In majority-Black school districts, local decision-makers overwhelmingly favored white schools when allotting funds from the state's preexisting per capita fund, and the resulting high expenditures on white students rendered these districts ineligible for the equalization program. Thus, while Black students residing in majority-white districts benefitted from increased spending and standards for Black schools, those in majority-Black districts continued to experience extremely low'and even worsening'school funding. We model the processes that led the so-called equalization policy to create disparities in schooling resources for Black students, and estimate effects on Black children using both a neighboring-counties design and an IV strategy. We find that local educational spending had large impacts on Black enrollment rates, as reported in the 1940 census, with Black educational attainment increasing in marginal spending. Finally, we link the 1940 and 2000 censuses to show that Black children exposed to higher levels of school expenditures had significantly more completed schooling and higher income late in life.
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Head Start and Mothers' Work: Free Child Care or Something More?
March 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-13
Head Start is the largest public pre-school program in the US, but it provides many additional services to families. This paper uses a discontinuity in grant writing assistance in the first year of the Head Start program to identify impacts on the work and welfare usage of mothers. Using restricted Decennial Census and administrative AFDC data I find that Head Start decreases employment rates and hours worked per week for single mothers. I also find a suggestive increase in welfare receipt for single mothers which is confirmed by an increase in the share of administrative welfare case-files that are single mother households. For all mothers combined there are no significant changes in work or welfare use. I also estimate long-run impacts, 10 years after a woman's child was eligible for Head Start. I find large and persistent declines in work for both non-white mothers and single mothers, accompanied by an increase in public assistance income and return to school. I argue that this is consistent with the 1960's era Head Start program's focus on encouraging quality parenting, parent participation and helping families access all benefits for which they were eligible.
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The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation
April 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-11
Court ordered desegregation plans were implemented in hundreds of US school districts nationwide from the 1960s through the 1980s, and were arguably the most substantive national attempt to improve educational access for African American children in modern American history. Using large Census samples that are linked to Social Security records containing county of birth, we implement event studies that estimate the long run effects of exposure to desegregation orders on human capital and labor market outcomes. We find that African Americans who were relatively young when a desegregation order was implemented in their county of birth, and therefore had more exposure to integrated schools, experienced large improvements in adult human capital and labor market outcomes relative to Blacks who were older when a court order was locally implemented. There are no comparable changes in outcomes among whites in counties undergoing an order, or among Blacks who were beyond school ages when a local order was implemented. These effects are strongly concentrated in the South, with largely null findings in other regions. Our data and methodology provide the most comprehensive national assessment to date on the impacts of court ordered desegregation, and strongly indicate that these policies were in fact highly effective at improving the long run socioeconomic outcomes of many Black students.
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The Timing of Teenage Births: Estimating the Effect on High School Graduation and Later Life Outcomes
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-39R
We examine the long-term outcomes for a population of teenage mothers who give birth to their children around the end of their high school year. We compare the mothers whose high school education was interrupted by childbirth, because the child was born before her expected graduation date to mothers who did not experience the same disruption to their education. We find that mothers who give birth during the school year are seven percent less likely to graduate from high school, are less likely to be married, and have more children than their counterparts who gave birth just a few months later. The labor market outcomes for these two sets of teenage mothers are not statistically different, but with a lower likelihood of marriage and more children, the households of the treated mothers are more likely to fall below the poverty threshold. While differences in educational attainment have narrowed over time, the differences in labor market outcomes and family structure have remained stable.
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The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
September 2018
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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The Long-run Effects of the 1930s Redlining Maps on Children
December 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-56
We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the full count 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long form 2000 Census. We use two identification strategies to estimate the potential long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first strategy compares cross-boundary differences along HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had statistically similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach only uses boundaries that were least likely to have been chosen by the HOLC based on our statistical model. We find that children living on the lower-graded side of HOLC boundaries had significantly lower levels of educational attainment, reduced income in adulthood, and lived in neighborhoods during adulthood characterized by lower educational attainment, higher poverty rates, and higher rates of single-headed households.
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Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility
July 2024
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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The Grandkids Aren't Alright: The Intergenerational Effects of Prenatal Pollution Exposure
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-36
Evidence shows that environmental quality shapes human capital at birth with long-run effects on health and welfare. Do these effects, in turn, affect the economic opportunities of future generations? Using newly linked survey and administrative data, providing more than 150 million parent/child links, we show that regulation-induced improvements in air quality that an individual experienced in the womb increase the likelihood that their children, the second generation, attend college 40-50 years later. Intergenerational transmission appears to arise from greater parental resources and investments, rather than heritable, biological channels. Our findings suggest that within-generation estimates of marginal damages substantially underestimate the total welfare effects of improving environmental quality and point to the empirical relevance of environmental quality as a contributor to economic opportunity in the United States.
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Every Breath You Take, Every Dollar You'll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-52
This paper examines the long-term impacts of in-utero and early childhood exposure to ambient air pollution on adult labor market outcomes. We take advantage of a new administrative data set that is uniquely suited for addressing this question because it combines information on individuals' quarterly earnings together with their counties and dates of birth. We use the sharp changes in ambient air pollution concentrations driven by the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments as a source of identifying variation, and we compare cohorts born in counties that experienced large changes in total suspended particulate (TSP) exposure to cohorts born in counties that had minimal or no changes. We nd a signi cant relationship between TSP exposure in the year of birth and adult labor market outcomes. A 10 unit decrease in TSP in the year of birth is associated with a 1 percent increase in annual earnings for workers aged 29-31. Most, but not all, of this effect is driven by an increase in labor force participation. In present value, the gains from being born into a county affected by the 1970 Clean Air Act amount to about $4,300 in lifetime income for the 1.5 million individuals born into
these counties each year.
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What Caused Racial Disparities in Particulate Exposure to Fall? New Evidence from the Clean Air Act and Satellite-Based Measures of Air Quality
January 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-02
Racial differences in exposure to ambient air pollution have declined significantly in the United States over the past 20 years. This project links restricted-access Census Bureau microdata to newly available, spatially continuous high resolution measures of ambient particulate pollution (PM2.5) to examine the underlying causes and consequences of differences in black-white pollution exposures. We begin by decomposing differences in pollution exposure into components explained by observable population characteristics (e.g., income) versus those that remain unexplained. We then use quantile regression methods to show that a significant portion of the 'unexplained' convergence in black-white pollution exposure can be attributed to differential impacts of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in non-Hispanic African American and non-Hispanic white communities. Areas with larger black populations saw greater CAA-related declines in PM2.5 exposure. We show that the CAA has been the single largest contributor to racial convergence in PM2.5 pollution exposure in the U.S. since 2000 accounting for over 60 percent of the reduction.
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The Impact of College Education on Old-Age Mortality: A Study of Marginal Treatment Effects
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-30
Using a newly constructed dataset that links 2000 U.S. Census long-form records to Social Security Administration data files, I evaluate the effect of college education on mortality. In an OLS regression, women and men who have at least some college education have 20% lower mortality rates than those with a high school degree or less. I proceed with an empirical design intended to illuminate the extent to which this relationship is causal, estimating marginal treatment effects (MTEs) using the proximity of the nearest college to individuals' birthplace as an instrument. Results indicate positive selection into college education (in terms of longevity) for both women and men. Selection drives almost all of the mortality gap for women. For men, longevity gains from college attendance are concentrated among individuals with unobserved variables that make them unlikely attend college. This suggests that men who would benefit most from receiving college education in terms of mortality reductions are those who are not attending.
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