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Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics (MOVS):
Infrastructure Files and Public Use Data
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-23
Federal statistical agencies and policymakers have identified a need for integrated systems of household and personal income statistics. This interest marks a recognition that aggregated measures of income, such as GDP or average income growth, tell an incomplete story that may conceal large gaps in well-being between different types of individuals and families. Until recently, longitudinal income data that are rich enough to calculate detailed income statistics and include demographic characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, have not been available. The Mobility, Opportunity, and Volatility Statistics project (MOVS) fills this gap in comprehensive income statistics. Using linked demographic and tax records on the population of U.S. working-age adults, the MOVS project defines households and calculates household income, applying an equivalence scale to create a personal income concept, and then traces the progress of individuals' incomes over time. We then output a set of intermediate statistics by race-ethnicity group, sex, year, base-year state of residence, and base-year income decile. We select the intermediate statistics most useful in developing more complex intragenerational income mobility measures, such as transition matrices, income growth curves, and variance-based volatility statistics. We provide these intermediate statistics as part of a publicly released data tool with downloadable flat files and accompanying documentation. This paper describes the data build process and the output files, including a brief analysis highlighting the structure and content of our main statistics.
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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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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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The Long-Term Effects of Income for At-Risk Infants: Evidence from Supplemental Security Income
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-10
This paper examines whether a generous cash intervention early in life can "undo" some of the long-term disadvantage associated with poor health at birth. We use new linkages between several large-scale administrative datasets to examine the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of providing low-income families with low birthweight infants support through the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This program uses a birthweight cutoff at 1200 grams to determine eligibility. We find that families of infants born just below this cutoff experience a large increase in cash benefits totaling about 27%of family income in the first three years of the infant's life. These cash benefits persist at lower amounts through age 10. Eligible infants also experience a small but statistically significant increase in Medicaid enrollment during childhood. We examine whether this support affects health care use and mortality in infancy, educational performance in high school, post-secondary school attendance and college degree attainment, and earnings, public assistance use, and mortality in young adulthood for all infants born in California to low-income families whose birthweight puts them near the cutoff. We also examine whether these payments had spillover effects onto the older siblings of these infants who may have also benefited from the increase in family resources. Despite the comprehensive nature of this early life intervention, we detect no improvements in any of the study outcomes, nor do we find improvements among the older siblings of these infants. These null effects persist across several subgroups and alternative model specifications, and, for some outcomes, our estimates are precise enough to rule out published estimates of the effect of early life cash transfers in other settings.
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Maternal and Infant Health Inequality: New Evidence from Linked Administrative Data
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-55
We use linked administrative data that combines the universe of California birth records, hospitalizations, and death records with parental income from Internal Revenue Service tax records and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics file to provide novel evidence on economic inequality in infant and maternal health. We find that birth outcomes vary nonmonotonically with parental income, and that children of parents in the top ventile of the income distribution have higher rates of low birth weight and preterm birth than those in the bottom ventile. However, unlike birth outcomes, infant mortality varies monotonically with income, and infants of parents in the top ventile of the income distribution---who have the worst birth outcomes---have a death rate that is half that of infants of parents in the bottom ventile. When studying maternal health, we find a similar pattern of non-monotonicity between income and severe maternal morbidity, and a monotonic and decreasing relationship between income and maternal mortality. At the same time, these disparities by parental income are small when compared to racial disparities, and we observe virtually no convergence in health outcomes across racial and ethnic groups as income rises. Indeed, infant and maternal health in Black families at the top of the income distribution is markedly worse than that of white families at the bottom of the income distribution. Lastly, we benchmark the health gradients in California to those in Sweden, finding that infant and maternal health is worse in California than in Sweden for most outcomes throughout the entire income distribution.
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Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants' Intergenerational Mobility Across the 20th Century
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-20
During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that educational deficits among lower-status groups persisted across multiple generations. Here, we advance another argument, that European immigrants may have 'leapfrogged' or exceeded U.S.-born non-Hispanic white attainment by the third generation. To assess these ideas, we reconstituted three-generation families by linking individuals across the 1940 Census, years 1973, 1979, 1981-90 of the Current Population Survey, the 2000 Census, and years 2001-2017 of the American Community Survey. Results show that most European immigrant groups not only caught up with U.S.-born whites by the second generation, but surpassed them, and this advantage further increased in the third generation. This research provides a new understanding of the time to integration for 20th century European immigrant groups by showing that they integrated at a faster pace than previously thought, indicative of a process of accelerated upward mobility.
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Family Formation and the Great Recession
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-42R
This paper studies how exposure to recessions as a young adult impacts long-term family formation in the context of the Great Recession. Using confidential linked survey data from U.S. Census, I document that exposure to a 1 pp larger unemployment shock in the Great Recession in one's early 20s is associated with a 0.8 pp decline in likelihood of marriage by their early 30s. These effects are not explained by substitution toward cohabitation with unmarried partners, are concentrated among whites, and are notably absent for individuals from high-income families. The estimated effects on fertility are also negative but imprecisely estimated. A back-of-the-envelope exercise suggests that these reductions in family formation may have increased the long-run impact of the Recession on consumption relative to its impact on individual earnings by a considerable extent.
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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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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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The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-42R
We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. We find that children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby tracts: for children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $4,200 across tracts within counties. We illustrate how these tract-level data can provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. First, we show that the estimates permit precise targeting of policies to improve economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's outcomes. Our historical estimates are informative predictors of outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood conditions are relatively stable over time. Second, we show that the observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' outcomes. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to low-income families, providing an input into the design of affordable housing policies. Our measures of children's long-term outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the same as those that lead to productive labor markets.
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