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Heritability and Social Interaction in Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From the Population of Twins in the United States
September 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-57
We use data on 44,000 twin pairs observed as adolescents in the 2000 Census, linked to their earnings 20 years later, to study the heritability of labor market outcomes. We extend the Classical Twins Design (CTD), which identifies heritability from contrasts between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, to settings where an analyst does not observe zygosity but can measure outcomes for same-sex and opposite-sex twins. We also allow for the presence of a family- and sex-specific component affecting same-sex siblings but only partly shared by opposite-sex siblings. Our extended model identifies heritability from the difference-in-differences of same-sex vs. opposite-sex twins vs. siblings. The estimates indicate strong heritability (h2'''0.36) of log earnings.''Using an AKM (Abowd et al., 1999) decomposition that separates the person-specific component of earnings from employer-specific pay premiums, we find that both components are heritable. The heritability of employer pay premiums, however, is mainly driven by same-sex twins who work at the same firm, suggesting that social interactions may lead to an over-estimate of the genetic component in earnings. Excluding siblings who work together leads to estimates of the heritability of log earnings that are 15% lower. Similar biases may be present in CTD-based estimates of heritability for other social outcomes like education.
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The Long-Run Effects of Parental Homeownership and Housing Quality on Later Life Outcomes
August 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-54
We measure the effects of housing quality and living in renter- versus owner-occupied housing as a child on later life outcomes. Homeownership is the primary source of most US households' wealth, and homeownership and housing quality potentially have large impacts on children, yet we know relatively little about any long-term effects. Ownership and housing quality are correlated with income, neighborhood characteristics, and many other socioeconomic characteristics, making causal estimation difficult. Using the US Census Bureau's data linkage infrastructure, we create a new data linkage between the American Housing Survey (1995-2002) and administrative tax data (2016-2019), to investigate adult outcomes such as earnings and having a mortgage or owning a home, while comprehensively controlling for a wide variety of variables, including housing quality. We find strong positive correlations with growing up in a parent-owned home, approximately $2,000 higher incomes and a 6 percentage point increased likelihood of ownership. However, we find no evidence of causal effects: unobservables that are significantly less correlated with outcome and treatment than observables would drive the coefficients of interest to zero, and family fixed effects models that compare siblings to each other show no effect of years of childhood spent in an owned home or being born into an owned home.
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Lands of Opportunity: Differences in the Geography of Wealth and Income Mobility in the United States
May 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-30
We provide new county-level estimates of intergenerational mobility, covering multiple economic concepts: total income, labor income, homeownership, housing wealth, and total wealth. This is possible via small-area estimation techniques and linked survey and administrative data covering millions of U.S. children born between 1978 and 1986. We find that relative mobility in wealth concepts shows less spatial clustering and more spatial variation than relative mobility in income concepts. Many cities and their suburbs exhibit lower relative mobility (i.e. higher intergenerational persistence) in wealth concepts than in income concepts. Next, we show that various local characteristics are associated with some concepts of economic mobility but not with others. For example, we estimate a strong negative association between the local severity of the Great Recession and child income, regardless of parent position in the income distribution. However, the negative association between recession severity and wealth only exists among children from poorer families. We provide a public-use data package on census.gov to facilitate further research.
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How Do Neighborhoods and Firms Affect Intergenerational Mobility?
March 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-18
We use data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics linked to the 2000 Census to study intergenerational earnings mobility in the United States. We augment the standard intergenerational transmission model relating children's log earnings to those of their parent with an additional term representing mean log parent earnings in the childhood neighborhood. The between-neighborhood intergenerational relationship is twice as strong as the within-neighborhood relationship, even after adjusting for measurement error in parents' earnings. Moreover, mean earnings of the parents in a neighborhood capture over 80% of the variation in unrestricted neighborhood effects that reflect differences in 'absolute mobility'. Next, we use an AKM framework to decompose parents', children's, and neighboring parents' earnings into person effects and establishment premiums. Children's person effects are mainly influenced by parents' and neighbors' person effects, whereas children's establishment premiums are mainly influenced by parents' and neighbors' establishment premiums. These patterns point to separate channels for human capital and access to jobs in the intergenerational transmission process. Finally, we explore the implications for the Black-white earnings gap. Neighborhoods explain 30% of the Black-white gap in children's earnings conditional on parents' earnings, operating largely through gaps in average person effects. Conditional on neighborhood average earnings, children from neighborhoods with higher Black shares achieve higher adult earnings.
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The Mortality Risk of Raising Grandchildren in the United States
February 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-13
In the United States, grandparents who live with and provide primary care to their grandchildren have emerged as a particularly vulnerable group since the 1990s. Using confidential data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Social Security Administration, this study linked individuals aged 50 years or older from the 2000 census long-form sample to their death records from 2000'2019 (weighted n = 64,027,000) and examined the longitudinal association between coresident grandparenting status and mortality for non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. We found consistently higher rates of mortality for White coresident grandparents and lower rates for Asian coresident grandparents, regardless of the duration of primary caregiving, compared to their peers without coresident grandchildren. We also found increased risks of mortality among Hispanic long-term primary caregivers but reduced risks among Black short-term primary caregivers, compared to their peers without coresident grandchildren.
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Life-Cycle Effects of Women's Education on their Careers and Children
January 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-09
We study the causal effect of women's education on their wages, non-wage job amenities, and spillovers to children. Using a regression discontinuity at the school entry birthdate cutoff, we find that women born just before the cutoff are more likely to complete some college, and experience multi-dimensional career gains that grow over the life cycle: greater employment and earnings, as well as more professional and higher-status jobs, more socially meaningful work, and better working conditions. Children's early-life health and prenatal inputs improve in tandem with career improvements, consistent with professional advances spurring'not hindering'infant investments. Career gains are concentrated in jobs that require exactly some college, the same schooling margin shifted by the cutoff, which indicates that increased post-secondary education is the primary channel for these effects. Together, the results show that women's college attendance generates large career returns'from both wages and amenities'that strengthen over time and produce meaningful benefits for children.
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Parental Death, Inheritance, and Labor Supply in the United States
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-71
We are the first to study how inheritances affect labor supply in the U.S. using large-scale administrative data. Leveraging federal tax and Social Security records, we estimate event studies around parental death to investigate impacts on adult children. Our results indicate that the death of a last parent causes sizable gains in investment income'our main proxy for inheritances'and proportionate reductions in labor supply. On average, annual per-adult investment income at the tax unit level increases by about $300 (45 percent) and annual per-adult wage earnings decrease by $600 (2 percent). These earnings responses are large relative to the implied wealth transfer. Income effects are the dominant channel through which parental death reduces earnings, with children of wealthier parents exhibiting larger earnings reductions. Over six years, inheritances slightly equalize the distribution of investment income.
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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.
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Consequences of Eviction for Parenting and Non-parenting College Students
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-35
Amidst rising and increasingly unaffordable rents, 7.6 million people are threatened with eviction each year across the United States'and eviction rates are twice as high for renters with children. One important and neglected population who may experience unique levels of housing insecurity is college students, especially given that one in five college students are parents. In this study, we link 11.9 million student records to eviction filings from housing courts, demographic characteristics reported in decennial census and survey data, incomes reported on tax returns by students and their parents, and dates of birth and death from the Social Security Administration. Parenting students are more likely than non-parenting students to identify as female (62.81% vs. 55.94%) and Black (19.66% vs. 14.30%), be over 30 years old (42.73% vs. 20.25%), and have parents with lower household incomes ($100,000 vs. $140,000). Parenting students threatened with eviction (i.e., had an eviction filed against them) are much more likely than non-threatened parenting students to identify as female (81.18% vs. 62.81%) and Black (56.84% vs. 19.66%). In models adjusted for individual and institutional characteristics, we find that being threatened with an eviction was significantly associated with reduced likelihood of degree completion, reduced post-enrollment income, reduced likelihood of being married post-enrollment, and increased post-enrollment mortality. Among parenting students, 38.38% (95% confidence interval (CI): 32.50-44.26%) of non-threatened students completed a bachelor's degree compared to just 15.36% (CI: 11.61-19.11%) of students threatened with eviction. Our findings highlight the long-term economic and health impacts of housing insecurity during college, especially for parenting students. Housing stability for parenting students may have substantial multigenerational benefits for economic mobility and population health.
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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.
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