CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'income white'

The following papers contain search terms that you selected. From the papers listed below, you can navigate to the PDF, the profile page for that working paper, or see all the working papers written by an author. You can also explore tags, keywords, and authors that occur frequently within these papers.
Click here to search again

Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search

Viewing papers 1 through 7 of 7


  • Working Paper

    Gifted Identification Across the Distribution of Family Income

    December 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-73

    Currently, 6.1 percent of K-12 students in the United States receive gifted education. Using education and IRS data that provide information on students and their family income, we show pronounced differences in who schools identify as gifted across the distribution of family income. Under 4 percent of students in the lowest income percentile are identified as gifted, compared with 20 percent of those in the top income percentile. Income-based differences persist after accounting for student test scores and exist across students of different sexes and racial/ethnic groups, underscoring the importance of family resources for gifted identification in schools.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    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.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    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
  • Working Paper

    Granular Income Inequality and Mobility using IDDA: Exploring Patterns across Race and Ethnicity

    November 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-55

    Shifting earnings inequality among U.S. workers over the last five decades has been widely stud ied, but understanding how these shifts evolve across smaller groups has been difficult. Publicly available data sources typically only ensure representative data at high levels of aggregation, so they obscure many details of earnings distributions for smaller populations. We define and construct a set of granular statistics describing income distributions, income mobility and con ditional income growth for a large number of subnational groups in the U.S. for a two-decade period (1998-2019). In this paper, we use the resulting data to explore the evolution of income inequality and mobility for detailed groups defined by race and ethnicity. We find that patterns identified from the universe of tax filers and W-2 recipients that we observe differ in important ways from those that one might identify in public sources. The full set of statistics that we construct is available publicly as the Income Distributions and Dynamics in America, or IDDA, data set.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Re-examining Regional Income Convergence: A Distributional Approach

    February 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-05

    We re-examine recent trends in regional income convergence, considering the full distribution of income rather than focusing on the mean. Measuring similarity by comparing each percentile of state distributions to the corresponding percentile of the national distribution, we find that state incomes have become less similar (i.e. they have diverged) within the top 20 percent of the income distribution since 1969. The top percentile alone accounts for more than half of aggregate divergence across states over this period by our measure, and the top five percentiles combine to account for 93 percent. Divergence in top incomes across states appears to be driven largely by changes in top incomes among White people, while top incomes among Black people have experienced relatively little divergence.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

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

    September 2018

    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.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Racial Disparity in an Era of Increasing Income Inequality

    January 2017

    Working Paper Number:

    carra-2017-01

    Using unique linked data, we examine income inequality and mobility across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Our data encompass the universe of tax filers in the U.S. for the period 2000 to 2014, matched with individual-level race and ethnicity information from multiple censuses and American Community Survey data. We document both income inequality and mobility trends over the period. We find significant stratification in terms of average incomes by race and ethnic group and distinct differences in within-group income inequality. The groups with the highest incomes - Whites and Asians - also have the highest levels of within-group inequality and the lowest levels of within-group mobility. The reverse is true for the lowest-income groups: Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics have lower within-group inequality and immobility. On the other hand, our low-income groups are also highly immobile when looking at overall, rather than within-group, mobility. These same groups also have a higher probability of experiencing downward mobility compared with Whites and Asians. We also find that within-group income inequality increased for all groups between 2000 and 2014, and the increase was especially large for Whites. In regression analyses using individual-level panel data, we find persistent differences by race and ethnicity in incomes over time. We also examine young tax filers (ages 25-35) and investigate the long-term effects of local economic and racial residential segregation conditions at the start of their careers. We find persistent long-run effects of racial residential segregation at career entry on the incomes of certain groups. The picture that emerges from our analysis is of a rigid income structure, with mainly Whites and Asians confined to the top and Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics confined to the bottom.
    View Full Paper PDF