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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'adopt'

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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    Family Resources and Human Capital in Economic Downturns

    March 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-15

    I study how recessions impact the human capital of young adults and how these effects vary over the parent income gradient. Using a novel confidential linked survey dataset from U.S. Census, I document that the negative effects of worse local unemployment shocks on educational attainment are strongly concentrated among middle-class children, with losses in parental home equity being potentially important mechanisms. To probe the aggregate implications of these findings and assess policy implications, I develop a model of selection into college and life-cycle earnings that comprises endogenous parental transfers for education, multiple schooling options, and uncertainty in post-graduation employment outcomes. Simulating a recession in the model produces a 'hollowing out the middle' in lifecycle earnings in the aggregate, and educational borrowing constraints play a key role in this result. Counterfactual policies to expand college access in response to the recession can mitigate these effects but struggle to be cost effective.
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  • Working Paper

    Same-Sex and Opposite-Sex Couples and the Child Penalty

    May 2023

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-23-25R

    Existing work has shown that the entry of a child into a household results in a large and sustained increase in the earnings gap between male and female partners in opposite-sex couples. We expand this analysis of the child penalty to examine within-couple dynamics in earnings for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples in the U.S. around the time their first child enters the household. Using linked survey and administrative data and event-study methodology, we confirm earlier work finding a child penalty for women in opposite-sex couples. We find this is true even when the female partner is the primary earner pre-parenthood, lending support to the importance of gender norms in opposite-sex couples. By contrast, in both female and male same-sex couples, earnings changes associated with child entry differ by the relative pre-parenthood earnings of the partners and tend towards equalization: secondary earners see an increase in earnings, while primary earners see a small decrease.
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    The EITC and Intergenerational Mobility

    November 2020

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-20-35

    We study how the largest federal tax-based policy intended to promote work and increase incomes among the poor'the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)'affects the socioeconomic standing of children who grew up in households affected by the policy. Using the universe of tax filer records for children linked to their parents, matched with demographic and household information from the decennial Census and American Community Survey data, we exploit exogenous differences by children's ages in the births and 'aging out' of siblings to assess the effect of EITC generosity on child outcomes. We focus on assessing mobility in the child income distribution, conditional on the parents' position in the parental income distribution. Our findings suggest significant and mostly positive effects of more generous EITC refunds on the next generation that vary substantially depending on the child's household type (single-mother or married family) and by the child's gender. All children except White children from single-mother households experience increases in cohort-specific income rank, own family income, and the probability of working at ages 25'26 in response to greater EITC generosity. Children from married households show a considerably stronger response on these measures than do children from single-mother households. Because of the concentration of family types within race groups, the more positive response among children from married households suggests the EITC might lead to higher within-generation racial income inequality. Finally, we examine how the impact of EITC generosity varies by the age at which children are exposed to higher benefits. These results suggest that children who first receive the more generous two-child treatment at later ages have a stronger positive response in terms of rank and family income than children exposed at younger ages.
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  • Working Paper

    The effect of child support on selection into marriage and fertility

    February 2019

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-19-04

    Child support policies in the United States have expanded dramatically since the mid-1970s and now cover 1 in 5 children. This paper studies the consequences of child support for marriage and fertility decisions. I first introduce a model showing that child support enforces ex ante commitment from men to provide financial support in the event of a child, which (1) increases premarital sex among couples unlikely to marry, and (2) reduces the abortion rate, by lessening the cost of raising a child as a single mom. Using variation in the timing and geography of the rollout of U.S. child support laws relative to the timing of pregnancy, from 1977 to 1992, I find that marriages following an unplanned pregnancy are less likely to occur under strengthened child support laws, accounting for about a 7-8 percentage point reduction relative to a base of 38 percent. I find that the child support rollout reduced the abortion rate by 1-2 per 1000 women aged 15-44, off a base of 28, representing about 50 percent of the total decline in the abortion rate over this period.
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  • Working Paper

    Do Walmart Supercenters Improve Food Security?

    June 2018

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-18-31

    This paper examines the effect of Walmart Supercenters, which lower food prices and expand food availability, on household and child food insecurity. Our food insecurity-related outcomes come from the 2001-2012 waves of the December Current Population Study Food Security Supplement. Using narrow geographic identifiers available in the restricted version of these data, we compute the distance between each household's census tract of residence and the nearest Walmart Supercenter. We estimate instrumental variables models that leverage the predictable geographic expansion patterns of Walmart Supercenters outward from Walmart's corporate headquarters. Results suggest that closer proximity to a Walmart Supercenter improves the food security of households and children, as measured by number of affirmative responses to a food insecurity questionnaire and an indicator for food insecurity. The effects are largest among low-income households and children, but are also sizeable for middle-income children.
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  • Working Paper

    The Impact of Welfare Waivers on Female Headship Decisions

    February 2003

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-03-03

    While much of the focus of recent welfare reforms has been on moving recipients from welfare to work, many reforms were also directed at affecting decisions about living arrangements, pregnancy, marriage and cohabitation. This paper focuses on women's decisions to become or remain unmarried mothers, that is, female heads of families. We assess the impact of welfare reform waivers on those decisions while controlling for confounding local economic and social contextual conditions. We pool the 1990, 1992, and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) which span the calendar time when many states began adopting welfare waivers. For its descriptors of local labor market conditions, the project uses skill specific measures of wages and employment opportunities for counties. We estimate models for levels of female headship and proportional hazard models for entry and exit from female headship. In the hazards, we employ stratified Cox partial likelihood methods and investigate the use of state fixed effects or state stratified hazard models to control for unmeasured state influences. Based on data through 1995, we find limited evidence that workencouraging waivers had a beneficial effect by reducing female headship of families. We find little evidence that family caps, teenage coresidence requirements or termination limits will reduce the number of single-parent families.
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