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Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States
October 2024
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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Separate but Not Equal: The Uneven Cost of Residential Segregation for Network-Based Hiring
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-56
This paper studies how residential segregation by race and by education affects job search via neighbor networks. Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, I measure segregation for each characteristic at both the individual level and the neighborhood level. My findings are manifold. At the individual level, future coworkership with new neighbors on the same block is less likely among segregated individuals than among integrated workers, irrespective of races and levels of schooling. The impacts are most adverse for the most socioeconomically disadvantaged demographics: Blacks and those without a high school education. At the block level, however, higher segregation along either dimension raises the likelihood of any future coworkership on the block for all racial or educational groups. My identification strategy, capitalizing on data granularity, allows a causal interpretation of these results. Together, they point to the coexistence of homophily and in-group competition for job opportunities in linking residential segregation to neighbor-based informal hiring. My subtle findings have important implications for policy-making.
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Estimating the Potential Impact of Combined Race and Ethnicity Reporting on Long-Term Earnings Statistics
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-48
We use place of birth information from the Social Security Administration linked to earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program and detailed race and ethnicity data from the 2010 Census to study how long-term earnings differentials vary by place of birth for different self-identified race and ethnicity categories. We focus on foreign-born persons from countries that are heavily Hispanic and from countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We find substantial heterogeneity of long-term earnings differentials within country of birth, some of which will be difficult to detect when the reporting format changes from the current two-question version to the new single-question version because they depend on self-identifications that place the individual in two distinct categories within the single-question format, specifically, Hispanic and White or Black, and MENA and White or Black. We also study the USA-born children of these same immigrants. Long-term earnings differences for the 2nd generation also vary as a function of self-identified ethnicity and race in ways that changing to the single-question format could affect.
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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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Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-30
Americans rarely marry outside of their race or class group. We distinguish between two possible explanations: a lack of exposure to other groups versus a preference to marry within group. We develop an instrument for neighborhood exposure to opposite-sex members of other race and class groups using variation in sex ratios among nearby birth cohorts in childhood neighborhoods. We then test whether increased exposure results in more interracial (white-Black) and interclass (top-to-bottom parent income quartile) marriages. Increased exposure to opposite-sex members of other class groups generates a substantial increase in interclass marriage, but increased exposure to other race groups has no detectable effect on interracial marriage. We use these results to estimate a spatial model of the marriage market and quantify the impact of reducing residential segregation in general equilibrium. For small changes in exposure, the model implies effects in line with recent estimates from policy experiments. We then use the model to assess the overall contribution of segregation and find that residential segregation has large effects on interclass, but not interracial, marriage.
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Whose Neighborhood Now? Gentrification and Community Life in Low-Income Urban Neighborhoods
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-29
Gentrification is a process of urban change that has wide-ranging social and political impacts, but previous studies provide divergent findings. Does gentrification leave residents feeling alienated, or does it bolster neighborhood social satisfaction? Politically, does urban change mobilize residents, or leave them disengaged? I assess a national, cross-sectional sample of about 17,500 respondents in lower-income urban neighborhoods, and use a structural equation modeling approach to model six latent variables pertaining to local social environment and political participation. Amongst the full sample, gentrification has a positive association with all six factors. However, this relationship depends upon respondents' level of income, length of residency, and racial identity. White residents and those with shorter length of residency report higher levels of social cohesion as gentrification increases, but there is no such association amongst racial minority groups and longer-term residents. This finding aligns with a perspective on gentrification as a racialized process, and demonstrates that gentrification-related amenities primarily serve the interests of white residents and newcomers. All groups, however, are more likely to participate in neighborhood politics as gentrification increases, drawing attention to the agency of local residents as they attempt to influence processes of urban change.
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Gradient Boosting to Address Statistical Problems Arising from Non-Linkage of Census Bureau Datasets
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-27
This article introduces the twangRDC package, which contains functions to address non-linkage in US Census Bureau datasets. The Census Bureau's Person Identification Validation System facilitates data linkage by assigning unique person identifiers to federal, third party, decennial census, and survey data. Not all records in these datasets can be linked to the reference file and as such not all records will be assigned an identifier. This article is a tutorial for using the twangRDC to generate nonresponse weights to account for non-linkage of person records across US Census Bureau datasets.
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Revisiting Methods to Assign Responses when Race and Hispanic Origin Reporting are Discrepant Across Administrative Records and Third Party Sources
May 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-26
The Best Race and Ethnicity Administrative Records Composite file ('Best Race file') is an composite file which combines Census, federal, and Third Party Data (TPD) sources and applies business rules to assign race and ethnicity values to person records. The first version of the Best Race administrative records composite was first constructed in 2015 and subsequently updated each year to include more recent vintages, when available, of the data sources originally included in the composite file. Where updates were available for data sources, the most recent information for persons was retained, and the business rules were reapplied to assign a single race and single Hispanic origin value to each person record. The majority of person records on the Best Race file have consistent race and ethnicity information across data sources. Where there are discrepancies in responses across data sources, we apply a series of business rules to assign a single race and ethnicity to each record. To improve the quality of the Best Race administrative records composite, we have begun revising the business rules which were developed several years ago. This paper discusses the original business rules as well as the implemented changes and their impact on the composite file.
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Interpreting Cohort Profiles of Lifecycle Earnings Volatility
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-21
We present new estimates of earnings volatility over time and the lifecycle for men and women by race and human capital. Using a long panel of restricted-access administrative Social Security earnings linked to the Current Population Survey, we estimate volatility with both transparent summary measures, as well as decompositions into permanent and transitory components. From the late 1970s to the mid 1990s there is a strong negative trend in earnings volatility for both men and women. We show this is driven by a reduction in transitory variance. Starting in the mid 1990s there is relative stability in trends of male earnings volatility because of an increase in the variance of permanent shocks, especially among workers without a college education, and a more attenuated trend decline among women. Cohort analyses indicate a strong U-shape pattern of volatility over the working life, which comes from large permanent shocks early and later in the lifecycle. However, this U-shape shifted downward and leftward in more recent cohorts, the latter from the fanning out of lifecycle transitory volatility in younger cohorts. These patterns are more pronounced among White men and women compared to Black workers.
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Examining Racial Identity Responses Among People with Middle Eastern and North African Ancestry in the American Community Survey
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-14
People with Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) backgrounds living in the United States are defined and classified as White by current Federal standards for race and ethnicity, yet many MENA people do not identify as White in surveys, such as those conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Instead, they often select 'Some Other Race', if it is provided, and write in MENA responses such as Arab, Iranian, or Middle Eastern. In processing survey data for public release, the Census Bureau classifies these responses as White in accordance with Federal guidance set by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Research that uses these edited public data relies on limited information on MENA people's racial identification. To address this limitation, we obtained unedited race responses in the nationally representative American Community Survey from 2005-2019 to better understand how people of MENA ancestry report their race. We also use these data to compare the demographic, cultural, socioeconomic, and contextual characteristics of MENA individuals who identify as White versus those who do not identify as White. We find that one in four MENA people do not select White alone as their racial identity, despite official guidance that defines 'White' as people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. A variety of individual and contextual factors are associated with this choice, and some of these factors operate differently for U.S.-born and foreign-born MENA people living in the United States.
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