-
Housing Capital and Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-55
Housing represents the most important capital asset for most U.S. families. Despite substantial analysis of the intergenerational mobility of income, large gaps in our knowledge of the distribution of housing assets and their transmission over time remain, as housing is generally not reflected by income flows. Using novel linked data that combines survey responses with administrative tax data and information on ownership and valuation from property tax records for over 3.4 million families, we provide new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of housing capital. We find that housing capital is more persistent across generations than labor income. We document important disparities between average housing outcomes for White and Black children. These difference persist even conditional on parent rank in the distribution of housing assets, with the gap growing throughout the parental housing capital distribution. A decomposition shows that average differences in children's labor market outcomes associated with parental assets explain about half of the observed intergenerational persistence (a 'labor income channel'), and that there is also a substantial 'direct channel' ' conditional on children having the same earnings, children of parents with more housing assets have more assets themselves on average. The direct channel is also important for explaining the intergenerational gap in outcomes of Black and White children. Finally, we present quasi-experimental evidence that local housing supply constraints help explain spatial differences in intergenerational persistence across US counties. Our results establish the importance of housing markets, both independently from and jointly with labor markets, in shaping the intergenerational persistence of economic resources.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Locating Hispanic Americans, 1900-2020
July 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-50
This study examines Hispanic Americans' residential settlement patterns nationwide in the last 120 years. Drawing on newly available neighborhood data for the whole country as early as 1900, it documents the direction and timing of changes in two aspects of their location. First, it charts Hispanics' transition from a predominantly rural population to majority metropolitan by 1930 and also their growing presence in all regions of the U.S. while still maintaining a predominance in the West and Texas. Second, it provides the first evidence of the long-term trajectory of their segregation from whites in the metropolitan areas where they were settling. As shown by studies of more recent decades, Hispanics were never as segregated as African Americans. Nonetheless, similar to African Americans, their segregation from whites increased to high levels through the middle of the century, followed by slow decline. For both groups metropolitan segregation was driven mainly by segregation among central city neighborhoods prior to the 1940s. But new forms of segregation ' a growing city/suburb divide and increasing segregation among suburban places ' have become the largest contributors to segregation today.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Rural/Urban Volunteering Divide
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-42
Are rural residents more likely to volunteer than those living in urban places? Although early sociological theory posited that rural residents were more likely to experience social bonds connecting them to their community, increasing their odds of volunteer engagement, empirical support is limited. Drawing upon the full population of rural and urban respondents to the United States Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) Volunteering Supplement (2002-2015), we found that rural respondents are more likely to report volunteering compared to urban respondents, although these differences are decreasing over time. Moreover, we found that propensities for rural and urban volunteerism vary based on differences in both individual and place-based characteristics; further, the size of these effects differ across rural and urban places. These findings have important implications for theory and empirical analysis.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Decline of Volunteering in the United States: Is it the Economy?
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-41
This article investigates the complex interactions between local and national economic contexts and volunteering behavior. We examine three dimensions of local economic context'economic disadvantage (e.g., the percentage of families living in poverty), income inequality, and economic growth (e.g., the change in median household income) and the impact of a national/global economic jolt'the Great Recession. Analysis of data from the Current Population Survey's (CPS) Volunteering Supplement (2002-2015) reveals. Individuals who live in places characterized by economic disadvantage and economic inequality are less likely to volunteer than individuals in more advantaged, equitable communities. The recession had a dampening effect on volunteering overall, but it had the largest dampening effect on individual volunteering in communities with above average rates of income equality and higher rates of economic growth. While individuals living in rural communities were more likely to volunteer than their urban counterparts before the recession, rural/urban differences disappear after the recession.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Effects of Eviction on Children
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-34
Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement, and high school completion by assembling new data sets linking eviction court records in Chicago and New York to administrative public school records and restricted Census records. To disentangle the consequences of eviction from the effects of correlated sources of economic distress, we use a research design based on the random assignment of court cases to judges who vary in their leniency. We find that eviction increases children's residential mobility, homelessness, and likelihood of doubling up with grandparents or other adults. Eviction also disrupts school engagement, causing increased absences and school changes. While we find little impact on elementary and middle school test scores, eviction substantially reduces high school course credits. Lastly, we find that eviction reduces high school graduation and use a novel bounding method to show that this finding is not driven by differential attrition. The disruptive effects of eviction appear worse for older children and boys. Our evidence suggests that the impact of eviction on children runs through the disruption to the home environment or school engagement rather than deterioration in school or neighborhood quality, and may be moderated by access to family support networks.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Re-assessing the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis
April 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-23
We use detailed location information from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database to develop new evidence on the effects of spatial mismatch on the relative earnings of Black workers in large US cities. We classify workplaces by the size of the pay premiums they offer in a two-way fixed effects model, providing a simple metric for defining 'good' jobs. We show that: (a) Black workers earn nearly the same average wage premiums as whites; (b) in most cities Black workers live closer to jobs, and closer to good jobs, than do whites; (c) Black workers typically commute shorter distances than whites; and (d) people who commute further earn higher average pay premiums, but the elasticity with respect to distance traveled is slightly lower for Black workers. We conclude that geographic proximity to good jobs is unlikely to be a major source of the racial earnings gaps in major U.S. cities today.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Applying Current Core Based Statistical Area Standards to Historical Census Data, 1940-2020
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-10
In the middle of the twentieth century, the Bureau of the Budget, in conjunction with the Census Bureau and other federal statistical agencies, introduced a widely used unit of statistical geography, the county-based Standard Metropolitan Area. Metropolitan definitions since then have been generally regarded as comparable, but methodological changes have resulted in comparability issues, particularly among the largest and most complex metro areas. With the 2000 census came an effort to simplify the rules for defining metro areas. This study attempts to gather all available historical geographic and commuting data to apply the current rules for defining metro areas to create comparable statistical geography covering the period from 1940 to 2020. The changes that accompanied the 2000 census also brought a new category, "Micropolitan Statistical Areas," which established a metro hierarchy. This research expands on this approach, using a more elaborate hierarchy based on the size of urban cores. The areas as delineated in this paper provide a consistent set of statistical geography that can be used in a wide variety of applications.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
From Marcy to Madison Square? The Effects of Growing Up in Public Housing on Early Adulthood Outcomes
November 2024
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.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
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.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
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.
View Full
Paper PDF
